Good point Barry. Namely, network effects and first mover advantage.

There are many currencies out there with superior technology, lower costs and more use cases. There are also better burgers than Mcdonalds, better sugary drinks than Coke and better electric cars than Tesla.

However, when you are running a network, you need the nodes, the miners and the infrastructure and none of the competitors have that.

Besides, Bitcoin pretends to be the best store of value, something like gold 2.0, other coins are carving different niches like smart contracts, Defi, Dapps, oracles, gaming etc.

Storing value is where 90% of the money is and BTC has the brand, the network and the support of millions.

Bitcoin is also the most decentralized, the most antifragile and the most transparent. It is slow, expensive and inflexible but when all you want is buy and hodl for 100 years, those are features not bugs.

Why in the US they still use the 110v system when there better technologies out there? Because it does the job and the alternative would be prohibitive. Same thing with Bitcoin.