Bitcoin will not be able to overtake competitors in the market of anonymous networks

Ricardo Spagni, a member of the core team and developer of Monero, explained what consequences the Monero network would face if the Bitcoin developers decided to introduce anonymity into the Bitcoin protocol.

If this happened, it would be a big event, says the developer Monero, since Bitcoin is the market leader in many respects and the first successful cryptocurrency. The community is emotionally attached to it, so one might worry about competition from Bitcoin, but Spagni is not afraid of such possible competition for a number of reasons. 

According to him, if privacy ever appears in the Bitcoin network, regulators will simply destroy it.  But if, in the distant future, this happens, the existence of Monero will still be necessary and important, because unlike Bitcoin, Monero has already achieved many things that Bitcoin cannot even think about. 

“Monero is already used in Venezuela and other countries with oppressive regimes. And so, even if Bitcoin adds privacy, it's not certain that it will be easy for people who are already in the system to switch."

Spagni explained that Monero is similar to Bitcoin's backup plan, and that Monero has its own code, the cryptocurrency, the elliptic curve, and that it does not rely on Bitcoin's code.

He also noted that Zcash, a second privacy network, unlike Monero, has the ability to make transactions private if users want it. Although Monero's privacy is somewhat weaker than Zcash's, it makes up for this with the size of its user database, which is much larger with Monero. 

“This also does not mean that you cannot have non-sensitive transactions on the Monero network. For example, you can make details of a particular transaction public to confirm that you sent money to someone, and you can disclose that data to a third party, such as an auditor or tax authority, without revealing your other sensitive data.”

According to bitcoinwarrior.net