Why is Bitcoin better than other cryptocurrency? [duplicate]

Question

If there too many types of such kind of currency, will them be very cheap?

I have 4 BTC and since the current BTC price waves a lot, I am wondering this.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Only time will tell if Bitcoin is the better. For sure is the first introducing this concept and the biggest market cap at the moment.

Be sure to understand the "cheap" concept. Absolute value means nothing

Suppose at time t1 there are 2 coins and their prices are: A 1000$, B 1$

After some time this are the coin prices A 2000$, B 1.5$

At time t1 coin A was the cheapest!

Answer 2

Ripple is the most functional since it has nearly instantaneous verification & confirmation, approximately 10 seconds.

Imagine if you had to wait the 60 minutes required for total confirmation to buy something in your daily life like a coke at a vending machine. I think you'd either pass, use a fiat, or use something like Ripple. I've never waited an hour for a Coke, so I could be biased.

In that regard, most cryptocurrencies are not currencies but assets.

Then again, you could always forgo 100% confirmation and hope for the best, but we've seen how that's working for the exchanges that do so.

It should be noted that there is an element of centralization to Ripple, but it seems there are plans to fully decentralize.

Answer 3

Depends on your meaning of "better", which in turn depends on your intended use:

• For micro-payments, given a single bitcoin's value, it's mostly useless. Any of the new, tiny crypto-currencies would be much better for that - actually Dogecoin seems to be specializing into this role given it's the minor crypto with the most trading volume.
• As a store of value for your life savings Bitcoin is very useful as in the long run it tends to appreciate - even though in the short term you might get a hard blow should you need to take out some of your money when value's down a big notch, as is happening at the time I'm writing.
• To pay for small stuff without too much risk for the vendor, Litecoin is the single most useful as it allows vendors to get a couple confirmations in a couple minutes, nullifying the risk due to transaction malleability and reducing the risk for double-spending. Furthermore, it already has services in place for vendors willing to accept it.
• As a bragging item a 42coin might be better, given the value of a single coin (more than 100 bitcoins as of now - yes, you read that right). Be warned, though, after the mega-hype at its launch (reaching briefly +850BTC per 42coin) it's only gone down, down, down from there...

(post-edit expansion)

Why Bitcoin is not useful for micropayments, as-is? 1 satoshi = (aprox) USD $0.0000065 so theoretically you could send a micropayment in just satoshis. But then very few miners would include such a transaction without a fee, so you'd end up paying dozens or even hundreds of times the original amount in fees just to ensure it's included in a block.

Plus, the standard client asks for a minimum of 5000 satoshis to be sent, so that sets a hard limit of US 3.25 as a lower limit to be sent.

1 DOGE = USD $0.0013 and the transaction fees are usually between 1 cent and 10 cents. So I can send 0.1 US cents to someone and pay no more than 0.01 US cents in fees - and given it can use up to 8 decimals, just like bitcoin, I can actually send much lower micropayments. Plus, given the small amount of permanent inflation of Dogecoin, it's very probable its value will remain low vs. fiat.

As for usefulness for low-end sellers vs. that of Litecoin, in 6 minutes a merchant accepting Litecoin gets 6 confirmations, equivalent to a level of security of 2 confirmations in the Bitcoin network in a third the time with no extra effort from the merchant. For the good or the bad, it seems Litecoin will have its niche market in that.