Debate with Jason on the Model T Ford Bitcoin Fallacy:
I thought I'd provide a rebuttal to Jason's comparison of a market good (Model T Ford) and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a protocol for fungible value transfer (Money). A Model T Ford is a market good. When a superior vehicle of the Model T Ford is released, it can still operate on the medium (the road) to get you from A to B. When another altcoin is released, it has a different Unit of Account (Which no one would be using to price market goods), no one would accept as a medium of exchange (Because it hadn't first been a collectable and then become a store of value) and no one was holding. Money's feature is therefore to be the universally accepted medium for fungible value transfer.
A similar requirement occurred with the Internet which led to TCP/IP dominance. Although other protocols exist, they remain niche, because virtually no one else is using them. Why would you? If I wanted to go look up the history of Japan, for example and then order a pizza from dominoes, imagine the annoyance of changing networks. Even if this was made seamless, the work required for engineers to maintain 2 protocols instead of 1 is double, when it could all be done on the 1. The natural incentives of the market are therefore to work on the 1 protocol. Additionally, protocols require calcification as part of their utility (500 companies don't want to build services on the Internet just to find out 5 years later they need to rebuild the same services to run on a replacement protocol).
There were plenty of protocols other than TCP/IP suggested for the Internet, but only 1 remained dominant. I even recall during the mid 90's Novell's IPX/SPX was touted as the Local Area Network protocol while TCP/IP was supposed to be for the Internet. IPX/SPX even outperforms TCP/IP v4 in network performance for LANs. However, today nearly all local and wide area networks use TCP/IP, IPX/SPX is dead and Novell was bought out in 2011.
