The true measure of a crypto’s success may not be as obvious as you think. First of all let’s entertain the different unofficial metrics for success and see how reliable they are.

Common Metrics for Crypto Success

When the price goes to the moon

No offense to newbs (we all got to start somewhere), but this is a universally newb answer. According to Andreas Antonopoulos — bitcoin evangelist — “That’s (market price) not a very good measure of success because it is not what we should be aiming for.” Yet, it is what got so many people here in the first place. A lot of people get in crypto thinking this is a get-rich-quick scheme. And yes, a lot of people did get rich quick but there’s another side of the story. A lot of people got broke quick, too. Not everyone becomes Roger Ver.

It’s really funny how some individuals watch one youtube video and skim through a whitepaper of some new alternative ICO that could potentially become the new bitcoin, whatever that means! Some of these people even max out their credit cards, mortgage their homes, or just take out as many loans as possible thinking they’re gonna get rich.

A few percentage of these people might get lucky but statistics show that majority of ICOs fail. The odds are not in your favor. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest though. This just means that you should take double extra precaution when it comes to cryptocurrencies especially ICOs.

And when a crypto does ‘moon’ (a huge spike in price) it doesn’t mean it’s gonna stay there. Bitconnect moon-ed too and we all know how that turned out.

This is what Andreas said, “if you have a strong local community, what happens when the price goes shooting up across the cryptocurrency space is that a lot of new people start showing up to the meetups with a little sparkle in their eye. Yeah, you can tell! They’re very excited about this technology. No, they’re not. They’re very excited about the possibility of making some money. As soon as the price turns which happens on average just after it climbs to the high point, most of them disappear. I've watched these ebb and flows since 2012.”

Market Capitalization

This is another common metric for success but here is the problem: Market capitalization tells you which is the “richest” cryptocurrency.

Andreas assures that one day, there will be cryptocurrencies “richer,” “bigger,” more broadly accepted than bitcoin. It is very easy to do that, all you have to do is sacrifice the principles. You can make something that is cheap, fast, centralised, controlled, and censored. Then you can pump money into it and make it “mainsteam.”

Think about it, what do banks have that we don’t? Money! What does the world governments have that we don’t? Unlimited money! So if we measure the success of a cryptocurrency in terms of marketcap, then we are playing to lose. Banks could unite (hell they don’t even have to..one big bank could do this) and create their own coin and damn they have trillions of dollars. They could easily dwarf bitcoin any time they want. Anytime governments could digitize their own centralized cryptocurrency and make it 100 times bigger than bitcoin is today.

Mainstream adoption

Perhaps this is the most common metric for success in the crypto space and is widely accepted by a lot of my fellow influencers. Even I, didn't know better until more than a year of research. This is a tricky concept and in a way this could even be right but it’s more complicated than that. Again, I’m gonna borrow Andreas’ analogy.

Do you know what an operating system is? Of course you do! You run Windows on your desktop and iOS on your iPhone.

But have you ever heard of Linux? You might have. You’d probably even know that it is an operating system. You might even say something like this: it is not as popular as Windows, Android, or iOS; it is used mostly by nerds and hackers. Of course, some of you may know better.

The truth is all of us use Linux every single day and we don’t even know it. It is used in your phones, vacuum cleaners, cars, elevators, and every single web server you touch. Majority of the world devices runs on Linux from the smallest micro devices to the supercomputers to the Large Hadron Collider that shoots electrons at the speed of light. Android is nothing but a modified Linux combined with a few other open source software just like Linux.

Before I explain why Linux is an important analogy to cryptocurrencies, I need you to understand what Linux is.

Several decades ago, the access and use of operating systems were exclusive to big corporations like IBM and AT&T. They had monopoly over this technology and made so much money licensing it to other powerful corporations and keeping it away from ordinary people who couldn't afford such high license fees.

One day Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, decided to make his own operating system. At that time, that was the definition of insanity. He had a group of programmers build it and then distributed it freely. Long story short, it became the most widely used open source operating system in the world at the same time IBM and AT&T stopped developing their operating system because somebody created a free version of their system.

Today, the average person cannot tell how successful Linux is because they have no clue how their devices work. But, if you become a CEO of a small company that plans to build, say, a smart watch product; you’ll come to realize that instead of inventing the entire system, you can simply adopt or modify an existing Linux system for free. Back then, you’d have to pay to use IBM’s or create one from scratch.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like it, will likely be the Linux of not only our financial system, but to every other system that requires trust.

The Objective Measurement of a Successful Cryptocurrency

Measuring success may be subjective as each one of us have different goals. That is not my aim here. My aim is to objectively measure the success of cryptocurrencies. But how do we do that? First, we need to take a step back and understand the original goal of cryptocurrencies — the unbiased, selfless goal.

Bitcoin’s original whitepaper
In layman’s terms, the Bitcoin whitepaper says that Bitcoin is an electronic cash that anyone in the world who has access to internet can use to purchase anything without a third-party and the transactions are irreversible and open to the public. With this, you could easily deduce the underlying values that Bitcoin has: decentralized, open, borderless, trustless

DECENTRALIZED: there is no central authority, no central control, no king to be dethroned, no one on top; not even Satoshi, also no single point of failure

OPEN: anyone who wants to see the transaction history has access, anyone can contribute on system

BORDERLESS: you can do transactions wherever you are in the world as long as there is internet, no restictions don’t matter if you are in North Korea

TRUSTLESS: the system just works and if you have doubts you can learn coding in one of many online courses and then you will see for yourself if this algorithm truly is legit or if developers are just making this stuff up

With that in mind, we should measure the success of cryptocurrencies by how much of that underlying value it has retained when it gets widely used. In the future, the average person doesn’t even have to know that Bitcoin exists. Like Linux, they will only know of a global scale of decentralized open borderless trustless financial system. We don’t know exactly how this will play out but what we do know is, like Linux, open source always wins.

Bitcoin may win or it may fail, but the winner should be the one that reaches the most number of people yet retains the underlying values even after people forget they use it, just like Linux.