Bitcoin still dominates, how can other altcoins make a comeback?

Since the recent surge in the price of Bitcoin, altcoins have been left far behind, with Bitcoin accounting for 87.4% of all cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. As these alternative digital currency assets have seen a decline in market capitalization over the past two months, this has led to a decrease in interest in altcoins. There are many reasons for this.

All eyes on Bitcoin

Let's face it: Bitcoin's price action is now in the spotlight. A few years ago, altcoins were on the rise, and Bitcoin's market cap was "suppressed". Now that Bitcoin's price has increased significantly, many altcoins are facing price drops or people are losing interest in them. The increase in Bitcoin's price in 2013 also led to an increase in the prices of other altcoins (especially Litecoin), while this time the market cap of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Dash and others has fallen.

The top ten cryptocurrencies in the digital asset space have been firmly in control for months. Many of these currencies still have great value, and some people believe that these tokens can offer something that Bitcoin cannot. Monero has done very well, with its price hovering around $9 per monero, and Monero's market capitalization ranks fifth in the digital currency market. The reason why Monero has such a high value is mainly because people value its anonymity and its acceptance in the black market.

However, the trend of people focusing on Bitcoin is obvious. For example, one commenter on Bicointalk.org asked, "It seems that almost all major altcoins are losing value now, how can this trend be reversed?"

Another community member acknowledged the trend:

“Since the recent huge increase in Bitcoin price, it is foreseeable that most cryptocurrency traders will flock to Bitcoin because they don’t want to miss out on this train.”

Will altcoins still have value in the future?

Of course it has value. There is a lot of development in the field of altcoins, and many projects are testing new features. Litecoin plans to soft fork Segregated Witness before Bitcoin. Ethereum has released a new version of the Geth client with Swarm (a distributed storage platform and content distribution service, the base service of the Ethereum web 3 stack). With Swarm, Ethereum is expected to become web3.0 instead of just a cryptocurrency. The realization of these features makes people believe that altcoins still have great potential.

Even with all the advantages of altcoins, many people still question their usability. None of the altcoins have the scale of Bitcoin infrastructure, and many people use these altcoins only for daily speculative trading. In September of this year, Bitcoin payment service provider Bitwala wrote a notable blog post stating that “no one uses” altcoins. Bitwala explained in its recent blog:

“Our experience with altcoins is that no one is using them.”

Bitcoin still reigns supreme

Bitcoin has long been the dominant cryptocurrency, and there is little sign that this will change in the future. With the recent rise in Bitcoin prices to three-year highs, with a market cap of more than $14 billion, it has become increasingly difficult for altcoins to compete. Meanwhile, many altcoins are simply uninspired copies of Bitcoin, pumping up the price, and then dumping it.

Other altcoins may have use cases in the future, but Bitcoin’s huge leadership is unmatched by them.