“Bitcoin’s dominance will continue indefinitely. Its 10-year survival history is unmatched by any other coin,” said Monero’s chief developer.

As the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Bitcoin celebrated the 10th anniversary of its genesis block in January 2019, marking the first decade of decentralization. Over the years, Bitcoin has attracted the attention of retail investors, institutional investors, regulators, and even powerful government agencies around the world.

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In an interview with Shannon Grinnell's "Speaking of Crypto" podcast, Monero lead developer Riccardo Spagni, aka fluffypony, listed "Bitcoin has survived for 10 years" as one of its advantages, adding that in these 10 years, Bitcoin has proven to be solid. At the same time, the Monero core developer also said that Bitcoin's biggest advantage is its network effect, which other currencies cannot do.

He went on to say,

[…] You can’t beat it without 10 years […] It’s a little late for everyone to beat Bitcoin because the reason people trust Bitcoin now is because of its 10-year history, and anyone who trusts something new doesn’t have 10 years of history to fall back on […]

Spagni further stated that Bitcoin, the digital gold, has already reached a level of dominance that, according to him, will not be defeated. At the same time, he also claimed that Bitcoin will not be the only cryptocurrency in existence, adding that there will be others.

To prove this point, he used the analogy of cars: most cars used to run on either gasoline or diesel, however, they are not the only types of cars in existence, as there are electric cars and LPG cars. He said that this does not mean that gasoline or diesel are the only ones that power cars, but it is just the dominant one at the moment. However, he added that with Bitcoin, "this dominance will continue indefinitely."

Additionally, Spagni touched on Ethereum, explaining an analogy he had previously used for the leading smart contract platform. He had previously tweeted that Ethereum’s “boiling the ocean strategy has achieved nothing.” Spagni noted that the “boiling the ocean” analogy “is more about Ethereum itself than what is built on top of Ethereum.” He went on to state that the strategy is “it has to be able to do everything,” where one could build both ZCash on top of Ethereum and Monero on top of Ethereum because “Ethereum is able to do everything.”

Spagni said:

“Over time, I realized that this was true. Ethereum can do everything, but it can’t do all of those individual things particularly well…”

Spagni went on to say that if Monero was built on Ethereum, its usefulness would be very limited, adding that certain aspects of Ethereum would limit the ability to create large ring signatures.

He further stated,

“You learn to build on this thing that can do everything, and then the thing you’re focused on eventually gets diluted. Everything becomes mediocre, performance becomes mediocre, scaling becomes mediocre, everything becomes mediocre because it’s too distracting and you can’t build everything on top of it…”