Network effect is real, but that can not defend bitcoin if tx continue to stay prohibitively high.

Nobody was accepting Bitcoin as a payment in 2009. I wish I'd cared about it more then.

This is what most people don't get, these technologies are all open source. So even if some random coin comes up with a great new feature, bitcoin can just add it or at worst someone can create a fork of bitcoin with the new tech. The value is not the tech, its the network.

Bitcoin has good liquidity and been tested though many drops and spikes. Each time it makes the network more antifragile. No one wants to trust a new currency where a large percent of holders have never been tested and might sell off their entire share at any time.

> bitcoin can just add it

Bitcoin is pretty much impossible to change now. It's just too big for that.

Example: Segwit voting was available in October 2016 but didn't manage to get significant miner support, finally got activated in August 2017 after a lot of controversy, and is still not seeing convincing adoption[1]. It seems to be stuck around 10%. If a soft fork is that difficult, then more drastic changes must be impossible.

[1] http://segwit.party/charts/#

The project is still early stage, but still it promises to be what bitcoin should have been from the start : a decentralized, feeless and instantaneous means of transferring value.

What value?