Is ether really an "altcoin" at this point?

Let's face it. Just like bitcoin, it's here to stay.

Cropped photo by Ivan Radic via Flickr under Creative Commons license

For as long as I've been involved in web3, the term "altcoin" has been shorthand for "everything other than bitcoin."

There is certainly at least one objective reason why such a distinction is useful: Bitcoin continues to have a comfortable majority share of the global token market. So-…