Monero survived 73 delistings, while stablecoins moved $33T. Here are some of the projects that have tried to improve on Bitcoin and how each attempt has gone.
None has taken Bitcoin’s place so far, but several have carved out ground on individual fronts, and their track records show what a successor would have to get right.
The place to start is the job Satoshi Nakamoto built Bitcoin to do.
What Was Bitcoin Built For?
Digital cash has a bigger graveyard than most people realize.
David Chaum’s eCash pioneered cryptographic payments in the 1990s, e-gold offered gold-backed transfers from 1996, and Liberty Reserve processed billions as a “PayPal for the unbanked.”
All three depended on a central operator, and all three ended the same way: bankruptcy, prosecution, or seizure. US prosecutors shut down Liberty Reserve in 2013 over roughly $6 billion in alleged money laundering.
Bitcoin’s job, as Satoshi framed it, is peer-to-peer cash that no one can freeze, censor, or inflate, with a fixed supply that lets it hold value over time. Any would-be successor has to compete on those terms.
Read More: What Happens if Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Comes Back?
What Are Bitcoin’s Main Competitors?
Monero
Bitcoin Cash
The trade-off shows up when looking at the security budget. At roughly 3.75 EH/s, Bitcoin Cash runs on about 0.4% of Bitcoin’s hash power; Bitcoin crossed one zetahash per second in September 2025, around 250x Bitcoin Cash’s entire network. BCH has also lost more than 95% of its value against BTC since the fork.
Tokenized Gold
Source: Top Tokenized Gold Tokens Page
Stablecoins
What Would Have To Change?
Bitcoin’s lead rests on network effects: It has the deepest liquidity, the largest security budget, and the broadest institutional access. A challenger would need a front where those advantages carry less weight, and on-chain surveillance looks like a clear candidate.
If chain analysis keeps improving and governments push on Bitcoin’s open ledger — taxing, tracking, or blacklisting coins by their history — then Monero’s built-in privacy shifts from a niche preference to a requirement for anyone who wants digital cash.
Even Peter Schiff, who spent 15 years calling Bitcoin worthless, now grants the privacy point:
His criticism concerns Bitcoin’s design rather than its price.
Bitcoin Cash pitched itself as everyday payments money, but stablecoins now carry most of that volume, and merchant adoption for BCH remains limited. Bitcoin hasn’t stood still either: Lightning already handles the cheap, fast payments the forks promised, without changing the base layer.
Each challenger has arguably beaten Bitcoin at something. Monero offers stronger privacy, Bitcoin Cash has cheaper base-layer payments, tokenized gold features a steadier price, and stablecoins settle far greater volume.
But each has also given something up to get there, whether that be security budget, decentralization, or censorship resistance.
No project has yet combined all of those properties in a single network, and until one does, the question of whether a “better” Bitcoin will one day replace the original cryptocurrency remains open.
Read more: Will Bitcoin Survive Quantum Computing? Inside the Race Toward Q-Day
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