Every altcoin is doomed to fail, and the BLAKE2b Bitcoin fork will be no different. Even if a new coin is founded on high ideals (and Luke Dashjr's BLAKE2b coin seems to be) those ideals are always trumped by human incentives. People act to improve their situation. When a new currency launches into a world that already knows what real money looks like, almost nobody treats the new tokens as something to hold and use long-term. Instead, they treat them as something to extract value from. That simple fact of human action has killed every engineered alternative throughout history, and it is killing them still. This is not about code quality, hash functions, or regulation. It's about praxeology, the study of purposeful human action. Ludwig von Mises put it cleanly: action is "will put into operation and transformed into an agency." It is the conscious choice of means to reach preferred ends under scarcity. Murray Rothbard added that we start from the undeniable fact that people have goals and select means to attain them. When those means include a newly created token that everyone already understands is softer than the hardest money available, the rational action is to dump it. The Kirtland Safety Society I was raised Mormon/LDS (though I'm not one anymore), so I grew up hearing about the Kirtland Safety Society. In 1836–1837, the early Latter-day Saint community in Kirtland, Ohio, faced heavy debts. Church leaders organized the Kirtland Safety Society as a way to help pay those debts and give locals (LDS or not) an alternative money they could opt into. They sold stock, printed notes, and put them into circulation as local currency. After the Ohio legislature denied them a bank charter, they reorganized it as an "anti-banking" company and kept issuing paper notes. But the surrounding economy primarily valued gold and silver. Merchants, traders, and other participants intuitively understood the difference between hard money and paper claims on land and goodwill. Many accepted the notes at deep discounts or carried them straight back to the counter to demand hard money like gold and silver. Opponents accumulated notes and presented them in volume. Speculators and insiders moved assets. The Panic of 1837 tightened conditions further. Reserves drained, confidence collapsed, and by the summer of 1837 the notes were effectively worthless and the institution shut down. A conspiracy was unnecessary. People simply acted on the knowledge available to them. A known, softer money, launched upon a population that already understands the principles of hard money, gets spent, discounted, and abandoned. The same pattern appears every time. Bitcoin's Unrepeatable Start Money takes root when it emerges from something people already trade and value, not when it is announced fully formed. Bitcoin satisfied that condition through what many call its "immaculate conception." The protocol appeared in 2009 with no pre-mine announcement to a retail audience, no marketing campaign, no central treasury, and almost no one treating the coins as valuable money for about the first year-and-a-half of its existence. Early participants mostly mined them by expending real electricity and hardware, or received tiny amounts in low-stakes experiments. Value accrued slowly among a small group of hobbyists for years before broader awareness arrived. By the time the wider public finally noticed Bitcoin, the 21-million hard cap was already defended by accumulated proof-of-work and social consensus around its immutability. Switching costs and network effects had begun to compound. That sequence cannot be recreated on purpose. The quiet, leaderless bootstrap is a singular historical event. Why Every Fork and Altcoin Can Only Fail Once people understand the game, new tokens launch into a market full of actors who know exactly how to play it. In 2017, Bitcoin Cash handed existing holders an equal number of new coins, which most people sold for real Bitcoin. The same thing happened with Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, and the long list of lesser forks. Liquidity, mining power, development talent, and brand recognition stayed with the original chain. The forks became thinly traded assets used mainly for speculation and exit liquidity. Altcoins marketed as "the next Bitcoin" follow the same script. Founders and early investors receive allocations. Marketing creates temporary demand. Rational holders and traders sell the new tokens for the hardest, most liquid asset available: Bitcoin. The project becomes an unintended capital funnel driving value back into BTC. Creators spread hype, early buyers try to flip it, and smart money uses the token as exit liquidity. The incentives guarantee the outcome. The BLAKE2b fork is the latest example playing out right now. After an earlier minority effort around BIP-110 stalled, supporters activated a hard fork that permanently changed proof-of-work from SHA-256d to BLAKE2b and imposed temporary tighter limits on arbitrary data. Existing holders receive the new coins on the minority chain. Because market participants are fully aware of the split, most do not adopt the new chain as money. They treat the coins as a free bonus to sell for more real Bitcoin. Hashrate, exchange support, liquidity, and cultural recognition remain overwhelmingly with the original chain. The fork continues as a small, separate network, but the economic majority ignores it. The incentive structure has not changed. The Inescapable End Mises observed that human action is always the attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. When two monies exist side by side and one is clearly harder, scarcer, more liquid, and more trusted, the rational action is to move toward the harder one. Rothbard emphasized that action involves economizing means according to the actor's value scale. A newly issued or newly forked token ranks lower on almost everyone's scale than Bitcoin once both are known and tradable. This creates a permanent trap for alternatives. Any deliberate launch or hard fork arrives with public knowledge of its rules, its distribution, and its relative softness. Participants therefore use it to extract value rather than to build a competing monetary network. Network effects never form around long-term holding because the creation process itself demonstrated that the rules can be changed and that free coins are available for the taking. Bitcoin avoids the trap because its early history did not hand the world a known, engineered soft alternative. The incentives of miners (irreversible capital in specialized hardware), long-term holders, and node operators all align around preserving the existing scarcity and rules. Changing those rules or spinning up a competing chain requires overcoming an enormous coordination problem against the established Schelling point. As we've seen throughout Bitcoin's history, that reality has never changed. Human nature has always been this way, and in all likelihood it always will be. Whether the instrument is paper notes backed by Kirtland land claims or a chain split with a different proof-of-work algorithm, people who understand the difference between hard and soft money will dump the softer one for the harder one. No team of developers, no charismatic founder, and no technical improvement can recreate the quiet conditions that allowed Bitcoin to bootstrap. In an open market where people are free to choose, they keep choosing the original. That's why there will never be a "next Bitcoin," and why Luke's fork will never be Bitcoin. There is only BITCOIN (BTC), and everything else that gets used as exit liquidity on the way back to it.
