Those who were around at the birth of the internet may remember the competition for internet dominance: Gopher or the World Wide Web (www).
A new report out by Adamant Research uses this analogy to answer the question: should I invest in Bitcoin only, or sprinkle my portfolio with some altcoins too?
Some of us take the latter view. Adamant originally supported a sprinkling of altcoins too but has since pivoted to Bitcoin only.
Going back to the tussle between Gopher and www, this is what Adamant has to say:
Gopher had a head start, but slowly lost ground because it was less censorship resistant, required more top-down oversight, and because it fell apart in many different forks. After several years of competing, the WWW started to dominate and Gopher completely fell by the wayside. Similarly, we expect less reliable cryptocoins such as Ethereum, Ripple, and Cardano to ultimately lose the war and dwindle against victor bitcoin.
The arguments against Bitcoin – it’s too slow, cannot scale, it’s not really good for transactions – have since been answered with the emergence of the Lightning Network, which is a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, which gave it its current potential to facilitate millions of transactions per second.
There’s also criticism of Bitcoin for “having no privacy features” – your BTC addresses can be tracked and sometimes identified on the blockchain – which gave rise tpo privacy coins such as Monero, Zcash, Secret and Oasis Network.
In 2021 a soft upgrade to bitcoin called Taproot enabled a range of powerful privacy solutions for bitcoin, making the Lightning Network more private, and allowing for new forms of collaborative custody and smart spending contracts such as CoinJoin, ROAST, FROST, and FediMint.
The pattern that we see here is that there is no limit to the features that can be incorporated in bitcoin, because its blockchain offers a robust foundation on top of which a whole suite of other protocols can be built.
“In sum, we recommend to not worry about “diversification” in cryptocurrencies and to focus exclusively on bitcoin. It’s the right tool for the job, so pick it up and add it to your toolbox,” says Adamant.
We see the argument, but still hold onto the altcoins we accumulated over the years and have done surprisingly well for us in 2025.
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