Bitcoin gave value to stocks, bonds and property. Bitcoin’s competitors gave value to Bitcoin.
There has yet to be a true competitor that gives value to Ethereum.

For something to be truly valuable, it must first be challenged by something attempting to replicate or improve upon its unique proposition. Competition is proof that a thing is worth striving to match, it validates existence through attempted imitation.

Today, nothing meaningfully competes with Ethereum on its own terms. Ethereum is, for now, competing against itself. It is only when other chains/protocols strive to perfect what Ethereum is already doing such as decentralisation, composability, security at scale, that the market will explicitly signal Ethereum is of value. Competition proves the existence of something being the best.

In philosophical value theory, uniqueness isn't intrinsic it is simply a fact of existence, it’s a reflection of perception. Something is unique because enough observers agree it stands apart, not because it demands to be recognised. Ethereum exists today in that space: accepted, yet often underappreciated, precisely because its model has not yet been fully understood, nor successfully copied in its entirety.

If I asked you what asset has a 21 million limited supply and a halving cycle every four years, you'd likely say Bitcoin. But Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and other Bitcoin derivatives share those same design features.
Their existence doesn’t diminish Bitcoin, it cements Bitcoin’s category as a new form of money, while proving that human perception, more than pure technicality, sustains Bitcoin's dominance.

Bitcoin wasn’t dismissed early on because of its design or utility, it was dismissed because of human perception. Stocks, bonds, property are asset classes that carry the weight of institutional memory and social trust. Bitcoin gave those assets something to be compared against, and in doing so, inadvertently validated traditional finance, even as Bitcoin disrupted it.

Like Bitcoin before it, Ethereum is under-recognised not due to flaws in its design, valuation models, or user adoption, but because true competition has yet to materialise. As other blockchains inevitably strive to match Ethereum’s achievements in throughput, scaling, security, and token design, they will not undermine its position. They will validate Ethereum's existence.

The act of competitors building out more validator sets, designing deflationary token mechanics, scaling through Layer 2 solutions, all mirror Ethereum’s vision.