André Dragosch – Bitcoin, Not Crypto | BTC Prague 2025 Keynote

At the BTC Prague stage, I made the case that institutions are no longer treating Bitcoin as just another crypto asset — they’re concentrating capital on Bitcoin alone. The data is clear: most other crypto assets are degenerators, and the smart money is starting to act accordingly.

The Perception Gap

When I talk to traditional financial investors, I keep running into the same misconception: they think Bitcoin is just one of many crypto assets. One token among 40 million others. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin commands around 64% of the total crypto market cap — nearly two-thirds — and it has maintained that dominance despite an ever-growing supply of competing tokens. That’s not a minor detail. That’s the whole story.

You Can Copy the Code, But Not the Network

One objection I hear constantly is that Bitcoin isn’t truly scarce because anyone can copy its code. And yes, technically you can. But you cannot copy the network. You cannot copy the security. You cannot copy the degree of decentralization. Bitcoin’s hash rate has already hit one zettahash per second — a one with 21 zeros. Nothing else comes close. Lynn Alden puts it perfectly: most crypto assets are like buggy knockoff iPhones with a glued-on Apple symbol. Bitcoin is the original invention — the first true transfer of physical scarcity, via proof of work, into the digital realm.

Oscillators, Degenerators, and Hard Truths

From a pure investment perspective, Willie Woo’s framework says it all. Most crypto assets fall into one of two categories: oscillators, which roughly keep pace with Bitcoin over cycles, and degenerators, which structurally bleed value against Bitcoin over time. His research across thousands of tokens concludes that the majority are degenerators. Even among the top 20 crypto assets, only a handful show positive relative performance trends against Bitcoin. The rest decay. On top of that, CoinGecko data shows 3.6 million crypto assets have failed since 2021. And of the top 100 crypto assets from 2017, only 23 remain in that tier today. Those are terrible odds.

Diversification Is a Trap

Some investors respond to this by saying: diversify across many tokens and let the winners carry the basket. But here’s the problem — Bitcoin is so dominant in driving market direction that even a diversified crypto basket excluding Bitcoin has over 60% of its performance explained by Bitcoin’s price movements. You’re not really diversifying. You’re just adding noise and decay around a Bitcoin-shaped core.

Institutions Are Waking Up

At Bitwise, where we manage around $12 billion in assets, I’m seeing this shift in real time. Since Trump won the 2024 election, institutional investors have been moving decisively toward Bitcoin-only allocations and actively divesting from diversified crypto baskets and other tokens like Ethereum and XRP. Larry Fink used to be skeptical of Bitcoin. Now he’s one of its loudest advocates. These institutions aren’t working for altcoins — they’re working for Bitcoin.

Evolution vs. Revolution

To be fair, I don’t dismiss all crypto entirely. Stablecoins and real-world asset tokenization have genuine utility. But the way I see it, most crypto assets represent an evolution of traditional finance — incremental improvements like 24/7 trading and faster settlement. Bitcoin is something else entirely. Bitcoin is a revolution of traditional finance. A complete paradigm shift. And figuring out how to value that revolution? That’s probably why we’re all here.