One reason an inferior product stays ahead is because it was the first. This is part of the anchoring or focusing effect cognitive bias. Whatever comes first, makes an impression. It gets traction in our consciousness because it has the weight of being first. That weight acts like an anchor on our "ship" of consciousness or attention that fixates us to that position. Subsequent pieces of info have less weight and less impact to move our ship/conclusion to another position. The anchoring effect keeps us anchored at a certain position.

Mmhmm. Cool post.

And some people might say "MySpace got replaced by Facebook tho", but the difference is MySpace and Facebook are centralized companies and one may happen to be managed better than the other. (Part of Bitcoin's network effect is it will attract the best coders. There isn't a possibility of like, the CEO says something that people don't like and they leave.)

And there also are less variables, like between Facebook and MySpace you don't know if the background should be blue if music should play what info should be listed on profiles. There's a ton of guesswork and room for improvement, whereas with bitcoin it's basically just the mathematical property of how to pass info back and forth without 3rd party oversight, and there isn't really a meaningful way to improve on it. Tinkering around with supply size and things like that is just cosmetic, and wouldn't be enough to overcome the network effect (whereas Facebook's design and user experience can be meaningfully better than the alternative).

Above my paygrade, but it's my understanding that Bitcoin's simplicity relative to something like Ethereum makes it more secure.

So I don't really even see other coins as "better", just different and maybe trying to fulfill a more niche purpose. Like, I think Bitcoin not trying to enable smart contracts and etc etc is a good thing, and we actually want it to be crisp and simple.