This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

There are now more than 16 million

Bitcoin's in circulation with a total market cap of $130 billion. That's more than the market value of

Netflix, Priceline, or Starbucks. Just going by numbers, Bitcoin is the one coin to rule

them all.

But if you consider the spectrum of 600 actively traded

crypto coins as a financial ecosystem,

well then you can take an evolutionary approach

and ask which is the fittest of the coins or in other words every

cryptocurrency so be coin a theory there are many are a different species

Andrea Barumkelli a network scientist at City University of London.

He and his team used evolutionary models to approximate the real world behavior of

crypto currencies. Each week of currency trading was treated as a new generation of progeny.

Reporting their results in the Journal of Royal Society Open Science,

they found that a so-called neutral model of evolution best explained coin behavior, meaning no coin had a selective advantage.

Which implies this.

Investors choose which cryptocurrencies to invest in only proportionally to the

cryptocurrency's market share and nothing else so they are not

apparently considering other fundamentals like for example the underlying technology

or the purpose for which a certain

cryptocurrency has been designed for.

They are just sampling each cryptocurrencyly to its current market share.

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