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Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

venturebeat.com

31–40 of 140 posts

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#31
> Ethereum has raced ahead with technology that not only does everything Bitcoin can do faster, in higher volume, and at lower cost — it does a lot more besides.

Statements like these frustrate me, because they paint a picture as though Ethereum is a strict upgrade to Bitcoin, without depicting the many sacrifices that Ethereum has made to get its advantages. The word blockchain in general has completely changed meaning - no longer does it specify systems where there is no trust involved, instead it specifies systems that create a high interoperability between money and applications.

There's a huge difference in the security and decentralization model of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leadership, actively rejects the pursuance of one, and works hard to build a network that simply can't be attacked.

Ethereum on the other hand has a powerful central leadership, and moves faster and does things that are in general far less secure. When they hit road bumps like the DAO attack, the 'Spurious Dragon' chain split, or other major network events, they fall back on their central leadership to resolve the issue quickly.

That's really not decentralized, and it's completely different from the vision that Bitcoin originally painted. It's a completely valid model, and it's a step up from using a fully centralized platform like the Google Cloud, but ultimately the Ethereum foundation and surrounding leadership has the ability to push through controversial changes, something that is strictly rejected by the Bitcoin philosophy. It's also not clear what will happen if someone like the US Government leans into the Ethereum Foundation asking for things like capital controls. Bitcoin doesn't have a leadership for the government to lean into - it's going to be a lot harder to add captial controls to Bitcoin than to Ethereum. Depending on who you are, that's either an advantage or a disadvantage, but at the very least it's a very clear distinguisher.

For that reason, Bitcoin is far more interesting to me as a technology. It's the first and really only, technology that allowed something like a monetary system to stand completely independent of a leadership or a governance structure. Ethereum hasn't achieved the same thing, that much is made obvious by the fact alone that they don't know what the core consensus algorithm of the network will be in 18 months (maybe it will switch to a yet-undefined Proof-of-Stake, maybe not).

Don't get me wrong. Ethereum is doing interesting things. They've completely changed the way people thing about money and applications, and made it possible to apply money to everything. But it's far less secure, and it Ethereum today simply wouldn't work without its central leadership. To me, that makes it not much different from any other technology out there - its giving us new and more efficient ways to do things that we have already been doing.

But anybody who thinks that Ethereum is a strict upgrade to Bitcoin has completely missed the point, because Ethereum does not have the core value proposition that Bitcoin provides. Bitcoin is a complete financial system that you can use without needing to trust anybody. Not the developers, not the miners, not the government. Bitcoin is extremely impressive, and definitely is a technology in a class of its own.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#32
post #9

The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-80... It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

Just because the bubble is going to pop, doesn't mean that it will pop to 0. If bitcoin prices crashed to 1000$, everyone would call THAT a "pop", but it would still leave anyone who bought in a year ago ahead on their investment.

And it will leave a lot of investors with a loss. That's the nature of market crashes, and it'll hit the smallest and most inexperienced investors the worst.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#33
post #17

It's pretty clear what's happening. Ethereum (ETH) is rising because people are buying into initial coin offerings (ICOs). They aren't holding ETH, so they don't care about the price of ETH rising in terms of Bitcoin (BTC) or dollars. The ICOs are the significant holders of ETH. They haven't sold their ETH because 1) the price of ETH is still rising rapidly, 2) they don't yet need to access the funds for development,…

What % of all ETH is currently held in ICO accounts?

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#34
post #9

The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-80... It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

Web was a bubble too once. And then it wasn't.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#35
post #18
post #9

The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-80... It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

People have been expecting the crypto bubble to pop for almost a decade now, but prices continue to rise. At some point you have to admit that this isn't tulip bulbs.

Prices continually rising is an argument for how this _is_ tulips.

The valid counterargument would be that the tulips are largely being used for something other than trading tulips.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#36
post #9

The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-80... It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

WhalePanda in not an economist, not a digital coin developer, nor a professional coin analyst. At his website he describes himself as: "...I’m a Belgian Brand/Online Marketing/UX consultant with a passion for Bitcoin..." https://twitter.com/WhalePanda?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwca...

Obviously partial to bitcoin but has no more "street cred" that I do: "a California fine artist, UI designer, with a passion for Ethereum."

That is to say I am using Ethereum for my art catalog or Catalogue raisonné as an ad hoc copyright tool and historical archive. What does he or most people use bitcoin for?

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#37
> As a “hard fork” looms, which looks set to split Bitcoin into two separate currencies that will have to fight for custody of the Bitcoin moniker

This already happened to eth when the creators hard forked the chain in an effort to roll back operations of an eth application that was used in a way that the creators did not anticipate. If this didn't kill ethereum why would it be a problem for bitcoin? Fortunately for bitcoin, there isn't a highly influential and transparently self-interested creator lording over the project.

> Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from tens of minutes to several hours, depending on how busy the network is.

An unsolved growth problem for the reining incumbent that remains unsolved by ethereum. Transactions take a long time because decentralized proof of work verification is slow. A lot of people will say "proof of stake is coming!!!" but it's essentially vaporware and all signs point to the conclusion that it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Yeah, people are working on it, like all vaporware.

> Ethereum is actually a platform for new kinds of decentralized (often financial) applications (dApps) that run on a peer-to-peer network of computers

Except this isn't actually happening in practice. I am yet to see any "new kinds of decentralized applications", just toy applications that have no practical purpose besides internet roulette

> TL;DR: Bitcoin’s dominance is slipping because its utility is limited and weakening versus other more recently developed, less politicized cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin's dominance is not slipping because it's utility was marginal to begin with and eth certainly doesn't offer much in the way of compelling improvements over bitcoin.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#38

Why Ethereum's price is outpacing Bitcoin - FTFY The pace of adoption leaves much to be desired. And if you think bitcoin is hard for the layperson to understand, ethereum is a whole other can of worms.

Ethereum's adoption has already surpassed Bitcoin's with several metrics: number of transactions, trading volume, mining reward, and number of nodes. ETH also has ~80% of BTC's market cap. True, it does not have the name recognition that Bitcoin has, but its not just a price bubble that is driving this. This site has real time updates as to the status of the "flippening": http://www.flippening.watch/

Every single one of those metrics could be driven by speculation, they don't say anything about real-world adoption.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#39
post #18
post #9

The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-80... It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

People have been expecting the crypto bubble to pop for almost a decade now, but prices continue to rise. At some point you have to admit that this isn't tulip bulbs.

People spent most of the 2000s predicting the collapse of the housing bubble.

Coins are strange, because appetite for non-speculative legal use seems to remain low, but appetite for coins continues to be strong. It does seem to be valuable as an unregulated speculation platform...

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#40

Could someone that understands crypto better than me explain why Bitcoin's fees and transactions times have become so high all of a sudden? Is it just a matter of network congestion, or does it have as its root some underlying mathematical factor instead? Hoping to get a better answer here than on reddit. /r/bitcoin and /r/btc are both biased echo chambers.

Bitcoin blockchain has a limit of 1MB of transactions in a block. This was set in 2013, when Satoshi put it in place. He didn't give much explanation for it, but it was probably to avoid a spam attack. He said it could be raised later: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg151...

There are arguments for and against increasing the blocksize.

For:

- Support more transactions per second

- Lower fees for users

Against:

- Hardfork requires all full node operators to upgrade, or they could see incorrect balances

- Lower fees mean that miners make less money

Also, generally, there are some philosophical differences between the sides. The big-block side usually wants bitcoin to be more like a payment network, wherease the small-block side typically views it more as digital gold and store of value.

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