Mark Moss argues Bitcoin was a one-time invention that succeeded because it grew in obscurity before the world noticed. Any new decentralized network today would face immediate attacks and theft, making duplication impossible. Bitcoin's specific historical moment and network effects can never be replicated.
Bitcoin was sort of created in this immaculate conception. It was created at a point in time 15 years ago when nobody knew what was going on. Nobody paid attention to it. It was allowed to grow in the wild, and by the time people realized what it was, it was too big to kill. If you wanted to start something today that was as decentralized as Bitcoin, you'd have a problem. You would have to obviously tell people about it so they'd come and start using the network. As soon as you tell people about it, they want to attack the network and steal coins off of it. And this has happened many times. Every time somebody's tried to do something similar to Bitcoin, the world attacks it, steals money from it, and then destroys it. And so it's sort of what Peter Thiel called a zero-to-one moment. We created the wheel. You don't create a better version of the wheel. The wheel is a wheel. And so it's theoretically impossible to duplicate what Bitcoin has done.
