Websites like Coinmarketcap (owned by Binance) and many crypto exchanges give us the impression that all cryptocurrencies are the same thing, and that they can be "ranked". Some of these sites at least separate between "currencies" with their own blockchains and "tokens", some do not even that.
But there are big differences between cryptocurrencies. Only Bitcoin and a few other altcoins can really be described as "decentralized", while about 99% of the rest are centralized.
Most altcoins are businesses with "providers" and "customers", Bitcoin is notThe biggest centralizing factor is the
premine. A premine from the start makes it clear that there is some entity, a person or a group (often called "the team" or "the devs") who are the "owners" or "providers" of the coin. They are responsible to conduct ICOs, giveaways, bounty campaigns and so on - which is easy for them as they have generated these coins for free. Development work may be significant in cases like Ethereum. But the relation is always pretty clearly one of
a single "provider" or "issuer" (the team, devs, foundation etc.) and
"customers" (the users).
Compare that with Bitcoin, where no such "owner" group or "team" exists. There is of course a development team, but Bitcoin Core is simply the group who develops the most popular reference implementation. And it's perfectly possible that an alternative team eventually develops a more popular solution and becomes themselves the group who works on improvements of the "protocol", and that would be perfectly ok. In the case of centralized altcoins, in contrast, the "owners" can threaten alternative implementations with protocol changes with legal action (due to trademarks), or a fork and a dump of the coins of the alternative implementation (ETC case) due to their immense economic power.
The development team, in the case of Bitcoin, thus is not a "provider", but simply one of many "user" groups, like miners, exchangers, Lightning channel operators, merchants and simple "private" users.
I would argue even that the differences between these two kinds of cryptocurrencies are bigger than between distinct types of traditional financial products. The Bitcoin type is the only one that is fundamentally different from other products because there is no provider, no owner and also no issuer. All other financial products have clearly an "issuer".
So even a possible "flippening", where a centralized coin like Ethereum achieves a higher market cap than Bitcoin, would be absolutely a
non-event. Because it would simply mean that an asset of a completely different category is currently more "valuable".
100% premined currencies and tokens should be viewed directly as securities or loans. This is not a stance of mine
against these assets at all. I'm pretty positive about ICOs, security tokens, and utility tokens actually, they are a good opportunity for young businesses to raise money and should not be "regulated to death" (although they should offer customer protection).
But they are a different thing than Bitcoin (and a few other coins like Monero, NMC or Groestlcoin). Coinmarketcap thus is worse than an infomational website mixing the "market cap" of shares, loans, derivatives and commodities together. Would a trader of traditional financial products accept that kind of site?
Enough rant, what should be done?Exchanges and informational websites should help users to be able to separate the markets between Bitcoin and Bitcoin-style decentralized currencies, and centralized altcoins or tokens. So the users can actually know which kind of asset they are trading, and are not forced into thinking that "all coins are the same thing".
At the very least they should be
transparent about any significant** premine that happened. Coinmarketcap did this until 2016 or 2017 (I'm not sure about the exact date) but then decided to mix everything together. Among alternative sites of the same kind, neither Coingecko nor Coinpaprika seem to have such a categorization.
Premine is an extremely easy to detect in the software as it can be always seen in the first block and in the part of the software creating the Genesis Block. The work has to be done only once per coin. So there is no excuse for not doing that.
Ideally of course the operators of these sites and exchanges read this post and take action. But as this isn't exactly likely, also users can request and try to convince them to implement this simple change in their interface - in their Bitcointalk threads or chat/communication platforms. There may be reason they won't like that proposal, but I think it's worth a try
*I would only include those coins in the decentralized "Bitcoin category" that have strictly no premine, ideally also no instamine, where at least part of the blocks is generated by PoW and similar "open" methods (in contrast to close/permissioned methods like PoS) and obviously an own blockchain.
**A "significant premine" should be anything more than one single standard block reward. There are a few currencies with a few pre- or insta-mined "test blocks" like Litecoin; these could be included in the premined group or not.