Bitcoin vs. Altcoins: Why Bitcoin Is Different

Bitcoin vs. altcoins, what is the difference? Altcoins are all cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin. Bitcoin started without any advance allocation, has a fixed cap of 21 million and no company that can change the rules. With most altcoins, founders and investors held a large share from the start, and a small circle changes the rules. In the long run, almost all of them have lost against bitcoin.

Everyone knows someone who made ten times their money with a small coin. And every crypto exchange offers thousands of them, each supposedly faster, more modern or "the next bitcoin". The question is obvious: why bitcoin of all things? This article compares bitcoin and altcoins by their rules, origins and results, with figures from more than twelve years. What bitcoin itself is, is explained in the beginner's guide What is bitcoin?.

What are altcoins?

"Altcoin" comes from alternative coin. It means any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin. The first appeared in 2011 (Namecoin); today CoinGecko counts 22’434 active coins and tokens (as of Nov 13, 2026). New ones are added daily, because issuing your own token now takes a few minutes and a few euros.

Altcoins are very different from each other. Roughly, there are five kinds:

Stablecoins are a special case: they are not meant to rise in value at all, but to track a dollar. For that you have to trust the issuer, and it can freeze individual balances. They don't compete with bitcoin as a store of value, but with bank accounts.

Bitcoin vs. altcoins: the five differences

Technically, many coins look similar. The difference lies in who created them, who owns them and who can change their rules.

1. A fair launch without advance allocation

Satoshi Nakamoto published the software freely on the internet on January 9, 2009. Anyone could take part from the beginning and mine new bitcoin, just like Satoshi himself. There was no presale, no investors and no reserve for a company. How it unfolded is told in Satoshi Nakamoto and the birth of bitcoin.

With most altcoins it was different:

• Ethereum sold around 60 million ether for bitcoin in 2014, before the network was even running. Another roughly 12 million went to the founders and the Ethereum Foundation.
• XRP was created in one go in 2012: 100 billion units. 80 billion of them went to the company now called Ripple. The founders kept the rest.
• BNB was issued by the exchange Binance in 2017. Half went to founders, team and early investors.

Whoever owns the coins before everyone else earns from every new buyer. That is not a crime, but it is a different business model from money that belongs to no one.

2. A fixed supply instead of movable rules

With bitcoin, the cap is in the program: at most 21 million, the last issuance around the year 2140. As of Nov 13, 2026, there are around 20.11 million. Why it stays that way is explained in Why there are only 21 million bitcoin.

The large altcoins look different:

• Ethereum has no cap. The 72 million ether at launch have become around 122 million today. The issuance rules have been changed several times, most recently in 2022 with the switch to proof of stake.
• Solana has no cap. The supply grows every year by a percentage that slowly falls to 1.5% and then continues forever.
• Dogecoin has issued 10’000 new coins every minute since 2015, over 5 billion a year, without end.

3. Who can change the rules?

Bitcoin has no boss. Volunteer developers maintain the software, but a change only takes effect when users voluntarily install it on their nodes. How this worked for upgrades like Taproot is shown in Soft forks, Taproot and future upgrades.

In 2017, large exchanges and miners wanted to enlarge bitcoin's blocks and had already agreed on it. The users didn't follow, and the plan was called off in November 2017. Those who still wanted larger blocks split off as Bitcoin Cash. The price of Bitcoin Cash is now 91% below its level at the end of 2017.

With Ethereum, things went differently in 2016. After a hack of the application "The DAO", the founders and the foundation decided to recover the stolen ether through a software change. The majority followed. Those who stayed with the old rules have used Ethereum Classic ever since. Whether that was right is a matter of opinion. But it shows that with Ethereum, a small group can reverse transactions.

4. Security through energy

Bitcoin protects its blockchain with proof of work: miners spend electricity to find new blocks. Anyone wanting to falsify the history would need more computing power than everyone else combined. On Nov 13, 2026, it stood at around 927 exahashes per second (mempool.space). How this works is explained in Bitcoin mining explained.

Most large altcoins now use proof of stake. There, it is not computing power but coin holdings that determine who may write blocks. Whoever owns the most has the most influence, and these are often exchanges, foundations and the early owners from the presale.

Then there is reliability. Bitcoin has been running without interruption since 2009. Solana has halted several times, most recently on February 6, 2024 for almost five hours, until the operators jointly restarted the network.

5. No company, no marketing budget

Behind almost every altcoin there is a team with salaries, investors and a plan for when to sell. Behind bitcoin there is no one who earns from your purchase. There is no advertising campaign, no influencer contract and no press office.

What became of the top coins of earlier years

The best answer to "Which coin is the next bitcoin?" is a look back. CoinMarketCap stores its ranking for every date.

End of 2013: of the 20 largest coins, only bitcoin, XRP and Litecoin are still in the top 100 today. Twelve are not even listed among the 5’000 largest anymore, including Novacoin, Terracoin and Freicoin.

End of 2017, at the peak back then, the top 10 looked like this:

In 20th place back then was BitConnect, a Ponzi scheme with "guaranteed" interest. It collapsed in January 2018. More on such schemes in How to spot bitcoin scams.

End of 2021, at the next peak, it was no different. Of the eight largest coins excluding stablecoins, only bitcoin was above its price of Nov 14, 2021 on Nov 13, 2026 (+5%). Ethereum was 58% below, Solana 67%, Cardano 92%, Polkadot 98%. Terra (LUNA) was in 12th place back then with a market value of over $20 billion, and in May 2022 it fell practically to zero within days.

Even measured in bitcoin, the largest altcoin is losing. At the end of 2017 one ether cost 0.053 BTC, in November 2021 0.071 BTC, and on Nov 13, 2026 only 0.028 BTC.

Why are there so many altcoins, then?

Because they are good business for their issuers. A token costs almost nothing to make. Whoever owns it early and tells a story about it can sell to buyers hoping for quick gains. Exchanges earn from every trade, so they are happy to list new coins.

For you as a saver, it usually works the other way round: you buy late, from those who got in early and cheaply. And when the next cycle comes, the attention is on a new coin. What that means for your money and what to do with altcoins you already hold is shown in Altcoins Are Not Like Bitcoin: Why You Should Stay Away.

Many collapses of recent years had their own token at the centre, such as FTT at the exchange FTX. What you can learn from it is shown in Exchange collapses from Mt. Gox to FTX.

Ethereum: the most important objection

Ethereum is not a scam and has real users. It is a platform on which programs run: exchanges without operators, tokens, stablecoins. That requires flexibility, and it gets exactly that through more frequent rule changes.

For money you want to hold for decades, that is a drawback. Bitcoin deliberately does without many features so that its rules change as rarely as possible. Bitcoin handles fast and cheap payments on a second layer, the Lightning Network, without touching the base rules.

Do you need altcoins for diversification?

Diversification only protects you if the components fluctuate independently of each other. Altcoins don't. When bitcoin falls, they almost always fall with it, usually harder. In the 2022 bear market, bitcoin lost around three quarters from its high, many large altcoins 90% and more.

If you want to diversify, do it between bitcoin and other assets such as shares, bonds or cash, not between bitcoin and its imitators. What that looked like historically is shown in Bitcoin vs. gold.

Bitcoin is the only coin with a 17-year history on which a long-term model can be calculated at all. The site's Power Law model describes this trend. On Nov 13, 2026, the price was at 0.63 times the trend, just above the floor at 0.62 times. No altcoin has a comparably long and stable data series. How the model works is explained in The bitcoin Power Law explained.

What a regular bitcoin purchase would have brought over the years, you can work out yourself here: