What Is Horizontal Gene Transfer?

It took fungi over one billion years to produce just 18 inches of topsoil that we have today. The analogy I use is that, okay, there's thousands of different cryptocurrencies now that each make different tradeoffs. And so the Bitcoin, mycelial organism could perform horizontal gene transfer and just adopt what that other network uses and bolt it on to Bitcoin. It seems like a last ditch effort that says, wow, my strategy is not working. I'm going to steal their strategy and hope it works.