Coinbase CEO Claims BTC May Lose The Race To Altcoins

The Coinbase CEO claims that the most dominant cryptocurrency may be rivalled by altcoins soon – and surpassed by other coins as the industry evolves into maturity. In a series of tweets which are now viral in the Coinbase news XRP, Brian Armstrong highlighted the parallels between the early Internet and the cryptocurrency space.

He said that the challenges which remain are that internet developers are comparable to those that hound today’s young crypto industry. Armstrong noted the following:

“At Netscape, they were working with early internet protocols. Things weren’t very scalable (dial up modems), you had to be somewhat technical to figure out how to get online, and early websites were pretty basic (static sites, looked like toys).

Sound familiar to crypto at all??

They figured they’d try making a shopping cart (see if they could build a first party app).

There was no way to save state or create a session (for instance, to make a shopping cart), so they created the concept of cookies.

Then, next problem was that nobody wanted to put a credit card into the internet, because everything plain text over http. So they went and invented SSL/HTTPS.”

In a nutshell, the Coinbase CEO claims that just as early Internet users discovered better web tools, the cryptocurrency industry (which is 11 years old) is also gearing up towards new solutions.

“Slow internet speeds/dial up models reflect early challenges in scaling blockchains. SSL and HTTPs are similar to some of the privacy coin efforts,” Armstrong noted.

When comparing the two industries, the Coinbase CEO claims that cryptocurrencies need more features in order for the industry to reach mass adoption. Among these, he specifically mentioned the scalability and privacy features, which the industry depends on in the long term.

Comparing the privacy to the HTTPS privacy in the Internet space, Armstrong said that transaction scalability and privacy are the main two features that Bitcoin currently lacks. Because of this, he noted that there is ultimately an opportunity for an altcoin to become the dominant crypto asset in the future.

In conclusion: I think it's still very much up in the air which blockchain will help get crypto from ~50M users to 5B. The chain that manages to ship some of these scalability, privacy, decentralized identity, and developer tool solutions will have a big leg up.

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 4, 2020

The prices of the top 3 cryptocurrencies in today’s cryptonews are all dropping by 10% margins today. Bitcoin (BTC) currently sits at $7,814, while Ethereum is at $202 and XRP’s price is at $0.2069 once again.