Well, I ain't no hardcore, I like the idea to have other projects besides BTC, but IMO, what makes bitcoin different than anything created later is the fact government folks can't put it down... Of course they can make everything more difficult but it would be a useless war.
About the concerns you've raised, well, I'll try to give my OPINION about each: 1 - Encryption - As far as I know, I don't know about anyone 'beating' BTCs encryption, btw if someone is able to do that against bitcoin, theoretically you can do the same against any one crypto and the regular banking industry.
2 - Power Costs - That's also debatable, major miners need to invest on renewable power sources if they want a chance to operate on profit. Also the fact they need to make a high investment on such physical equipment creates an entire industry that helps to solidify the whole project.
3 - Governance - You might have a point here, but what really matters for most users is usability. Also, this is also debatable since nodes have the ability to accept (or not) any changes on BTC code.
4 - The fact we Bitcoin needs a 3rd party projects (Lightning) to make transactions faster and cheaper has major benefits such as SAFETY and STABILITY. If anything goes wrong, it'll happen on the second layer while the core keeps okay.
5 - The fact users keep to Bitcoin is basically the sum of everything beforementioned here and also the natural marketing that has... especially the fact no one knows who is true creator. It gives bitcoin an whole especial symbology.
6 - Scarcity - Everything is user support. Even gold and silver. Industries need it because users need the final product. The same can be applied to BTC.
7 - Miners - That we really don't know, but 'till the mining of the last block, probably there will be so many users that they will be able to make a living on the fees... I really don't know for sure about that but certainly someone more into bitcoin than me will be able to come up with a better answer.
For everything I typed here, I don't think other coins are necessarily 'shitcoins', there a lot of course, but I believe others coins are also responsible to create innovation, take smart contracts as an example, as far as I know that's an Ethereum implementation at first.
That's something bitcoin could use on a second layer I think...
Encryption - Even Bitcoin hardforks have improved encryption, such as ZCash - and guess what, they are moving to PoS like any smart project leaders would, which also has better encryption (depending on the project).
Power costs are never a good thing. I mined 100% renewable until ETH went PoS and did well. At the end of the day it's unnecessary and money spent on power and equipment you think will reinforce the industry when that equipment is heading to landfills could be better spent on more crypto. This is so pathetically true, miners actually mine at a loss - and a lot of it is bad for the environment.
Governance - I know I have a point because I know what a project with active governance looks like and it isn't a stalemate with hardforks.
Lightning node - A good chain doesn't need this feature to be external, nor can you rely on external software. That's a flawed way of viewing a positive where there is a negative. All it does for the positive is move assets faster than Bitcoin can, despite having a multitude of cryptocurrencies that go A to B for less than a penny in about a second.
Bitcoin being the "Coca-Cola" of crypto. Well, even Coca-Cola has changed a lot over the years. This mainly threatens the hard forks, eventually, people will break the correlation with Bitcoin in the alt market because it's foolish and modern projects will naturally take sway over time.
Gold and silver are required elements for every industry. Bitcoin could go tits up tomorrow and it wouldn't affect anything but a tiny % of the financial sector.
Miners at the end = there won't be any money in it, hence all your ASICS and old GPUs heading to landfills and no more $ to be made for miners because Bitcoin scaling won't allow the level of congestion required to turn a profit.
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