Although Bitcoin was the “firstborn” in the cryptocurrency world, it faces serious competition from Ripple and Ethereum, as per Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone warned. On top of that, it's also 'threatened' by its own siblings (forks).
As more and more people trade and use cryptocurrencies, it's natural for networks to get clogged as they struggle to adapt to the demand. Whichever coin gives the most utility value should win, but it's still a game of popularity.
Analysts say that Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency but it risks being overtaken by newer, faster ones like Ripple and Ethereum as we have discussed before. The problem with bitcoin it's like A.O.L. It's a first born and it's getting old. All the new ones are coming and transacting faster with their new and improved generation 2 3 or 4 technology. Now, bitcoin is becoming the old dog. The thing is, not everyone understands the differences among the technologies used behind new Altcoins. That’s why popularity is still beneficial for Bitcoin. Almost everyone knows it and it’s the pioneer in the crypto space. Its uses for main transactions across platforms. However, with things like Ethereum Ripple and all the other Altcoins in the market, there is so much competition not to mention now that we already have a few forks from Bitcoin.
Mr McGlone compared bitcoin to tech company AOL which was overtaken by competitor Google. Source
Is it possible for any of these Bitcoin forks to overtake Bitcoin?
Lets compare them starting with their current prices and technological aspects as of the beginning of the year 2018.
Bitcoin
[As of January 12, Bitcoin is at: $13,750.80 USD (1.42%)]
It suffered a major setback from January 16 onwards along with most altcoins.
The blockchain on which Bitcoin is built serves as a distributed, cryptographically signed ledger that makes it possible track and verify payments without any centralized authority. The ledger is maintained by computers performing computations that eventually generate more bitcoins. The same distributed cryptographic approach can be used to verify all sorts of transactions.
Source
The problem is it’s extremely slow. Visa can process 1700 transactions every second but bitcoin can process only seven. That’s why it has a problem with scalability and transactions take about 10 minutes or even hours to process.
Bitcoin Cash
[As of January 12, Bitcoin Cash is at: $2,519.89 USD (1.16%)]
Here are the differences between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash:
Bitcoin Cash is a different story. Bitcoin Cash was started by Bitcoin miners and developers equally concerned with the future of the cryptocurrency, and its ability to scale effectively. These individuals had their reservations about the adoption of a segregated witness technology, though. They felt as though SegWit2x did not address the fundamental problem of scalability in a meaningful way, nor did it follow the roadmap initially outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous party that first proposed the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency. Furthermore, the process of introducing SegWit2x as the road forward was anything but transparent, and there were concerns that its introduction undermined the decentralization and democratization of the currency. Source
[As of January 12, Bitcoin Gold is at: $218.28 USD (0.88%)]
While it was created using the same technology, bitcoin gold differs from bitcoin cash in certain ways, including its distribution.
Differences include:
The bitcoin gold cryptocurrency is set to be created in advance (prior to the code being open-sourced to the public). About 1 percent of the total cryptocurrency tokens mined before the blockchain goes public will be used to pay the bitcoin gold development team.
Once this distribution is over, the team claims it will launch the cryptocurrency so that users can redeem their coins. Of course, while it aims to become the de-facto version of bitcoin, others might consider bitcoin gold an "altcoin" – the term has long been used to denote any cryptocurrency launched using bitcoin’s existing code, but that has an alternative market or use case.
Who is behind bitcoin gold?
The team which started the hard fork seems to be a small group, comparatively speaking.
Hong Kong-based LightningAsic CEO Jack Liao, who's an outspoken critic of the state of bitcoin mining, first broached the idea of bitcoin gold back in July. His company LightningAsic sells mining equipment, including GPUs, the type of computing hardware bitcoin gold is supposed to rely on. Source
Why they all seem to be founded in good intentions, the advantage of having many choices is that people can use altcoins for faster transactions and these new currencies provide new investment opportunities. Overall, the hard forks, at least in my opinion, did not adversely affect bitcoin being the 'first-born' and still the most popular of all cryptocurrencies.