Trying to control Bitcoin and centralize it, goes against all the founding principles of Bitcoin, but that's exactly what has been happening in the Bitcoin ecosystem for the last couple years. On the mining side, huge pools are being created (mostly in China) that are causing what was suppose to be a decentralized network, into a boardroom where a small handful of people control a majority stake in the system. On the software development side we have Blockstream who are paying high dollars to all the key developers so they can make centralized decisions with all the influential people under their wing. They are even about to patent their ideas, so they can prevent any competition which is firmly against the idea of decentralization.
Through all of this Bitcoin has been having a huge crisis in transaction output. The system is capped at a theoretical 7 transactions per second, but in real practice it ends up being closer to 3. The company Blockstream has been using their money and influence to capture all the media and communication channels on the internet to change the narrative to whatever they deem necessary. There's been tremendous in-fighting among the community because raising the limit is actually quite an easy thing to do, but Blockstream has a business incentive to artificially cap the transaction capacity of the system.
While Bitcoin has been fighting with higher and higher transaction fees, due to these unnecessary restraints, other new more flexible systems have been quickly grabbing peoples attention and market share. Ethereum has leaped up the charts, but lucky for Bitcoin the momentum has temporarily been slowed down due to a hard fork because money was stolen due to an exploit. The hard fork has just recently been successfully deployed though, and that momentum might continue.
Steemit has blown people away and caught them off guard with its gargantuan transaction and price increases over the last few weeks. This kind of growth far exceeds what we've seen in other crypto projects in the past. If this trend continues, Steemit will be making more transactions per second than Bitcoin in no time at all.
Farther down the list we find alternative coins that provide functionality that would make Bitcoin blush. Coins like Dash, provide built in governance which they used to increase their transactions capacity in just a couple days, compared to Bitcoin's years of fighting. Dash also provides near instant transactions and built in anonymous transactions. We also find coins like Monero, which use systems that give almost perfect anonymous transactions plus flexible transaction capacity so it will never have the transaction capacity problems Bitcoin is currently experiencing.
We also have other projects like Bitshares, which boasts being able to provide thousands of transactions a second or more, and is also the father to Steemit we're all on right now. Its huge ability to scale while still being very flexible for all kinds of scripting makes it potentially a very under valued coin with a possible bright future. In the same vein I should mention Next and Nem, which have decentralized market places, high transaction capacity and their build on fresh original code.
As you can see from the short list above, there are a lot of up and coming systems that would be glad to sweep in and take Bitcoin's crown, and many of them have great development teams and are functioning as well oiled machines compared to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has the advantage of being the first to the market, but the people who are running it are taking too much advantage of that. If Bitcoin doesn't get its act together and fix it's transaction capacity soon one of these many competitors are going to eat Bitcoin's lunch.