Alternative Language - The Daily Gwei #254
Changing our language to match today's reality.
The term ‘altcoin’ or ‘alt’ has been used to describe crypto-assets other than Bitcoin for a very long time. From what I can tell, it started in the early days (around 2011) when people began forking Bitcoin’s codebase and launching a new chain with it (Litecoin and Namecoin are the perfect early examples here). These forks were often touted as “alternatives” to Bitcoin and had some unique feature(s) that Bitcoin didn’t have - but these days the ecosystem has evolved far beyond this.
As Kyle notes in the tweet above, using the term ‘alt’ is now considered “boomer” - in other words, it’s an outdated term of a bygone era. These days, there are plenty of crypto-assets that are unique and not in any way an “alternative” to Bitcoin (and more importantly, not a fork of Bitcoin either). On top of this, these assets serve completely different purposes to BTC - for example, some DeFi tokens are essentially an equity stake in that protocol’s ecosystem and some of them will direct rewards to token holders, stakers or have buyback and make/burn programs.
I think the reason that the ‘altcoin’ term has persisted for so long is because it’s simply widely understood and easy to use (especially among traders). I don’t think that most people using it believe that the assets they call ‘alts’ are in any way inferior or alternative to Bitcoin - it’s just simply an easy way to refer to the thousands of other crypto-assets out there. In saying that, there are large groups of people who still believe that only Bitcoin has value and everything else is a scam/shitcoin/altcoin or whatever - these people are obviously wrong but they are loud and do have influence (which just works to keep the altcoin term around).
One positive thing I’ve noticed over the last couple of years is that people now refer to BTC and ETH as being on equal footing and then refer to everything else as “altcoins” or “other crypto-assets”. For those who’ve been around for a while, you’ll be aware that ETH was treated as greatly inferior to BTC in terms of legitimacy and economic value even up until early 2020 - it’s only recently with the meteoric rise of DeFi, the hardening of Ethereum’s monetary policy, and upgrades like EIP-1559 that more people see the value of ETH. The funniest thing about all of this is that Ethereum was never actually an alt - it was built from the ground up as its own system and is substantially different to Bitcoin in many ways.
I don’t personally use the ‘altcoin’ term anymore because as I said, it’s outdated and a relic of a bygone era. Platforms and assets in the crypto ecosystem have evolved from simple forks of Bitcoin into fully fledged built-from-the-ground-up ecosystems of their own and that’s not even mentioning the thousands of tokens on Ethereum (ERC20’s, NFTs etc). I tend to use ‘crypto-assets’ as a term that is all encompassing and within that are sub-categories such as native layer 1 assets (BTC, ETH), DeFi tokens (UNI, MKR), NFTs (CryptoPunks, Unisocks), utility coins (FIL, AR), meme currencies (DOGE) and more. The crypto ecosystem has evolved - let’s change our language to keep up with it.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.
Anthony, great post keep em coming. Great point on updating the language to reflect the nuances we now see existing in the space.
Don't disagree but crypto-asset is associated with certain legal underpinnings (not a lawyer) in certain jurisdictions so I suspect this will continue to evolve