Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

1) It produces blocks every 17 seconds. It can do this without neglecting security, because orphan blocks count as uncles and are included in the security of the whole network.

2) It has a scalable/dynamic blocksize. The miners can scale the gas limit up or down by a certain amount. If the current gas limit (pi million) gets hit, miners can start increasing it.

3) Tx fees purpose is primarily for DDOS protection & solving the halting problem with turing-complete scripts. It's not a fundamental element for security, because the issuance rate is constant. This means that a "fee market" doesn't need to exist as much as in Bitcoin, in order to make sure the blockchain remains alive. It has an infinite, but predictable supply, rather than finite.

4) Future scalability improvements include Casper PoS, which will decrease block time to around 1 - 4 seconds & sharding, which will remove the need for every node to process every part of the transaction space.

These additions will mean that for the current period, transactions will increase, and perhaps lead to more centralization as not many will run nodes to keep the whole state. This is a trade-off in return for running more transactions.

I did it in one week, it uses Oraclize.it (which I believe is also available for bitcoin, so that's nice), and I am sure it can be built on bitcoin too, but the biggest problem remains this:

* While doing development in Solidity, and using HTML/CSS/JS for client, I am able to rapidly build a dapp.

* Writing the code in a higher level programming language created for the purpose of blockchain apps, allow me to think at a higher level abstraction.

* Training people to write in Solidity is far easier than training them to write in C/C++.

* Faster and rapid dapp development(RDD) will unlease a new age in blockchain innovation, and if you have been in tech for a while, you know that 'crack up boom' of innovation we see when Rapid application development became possible.

Case in point, Augur. Paul Sztorc has been doing development of Truthcoin for far longer than Augur people and even has funding from Roger Ver, but Augur has managed to rally a lot more people around it by delivering working prototype sooner than later, and now they're already in Beta, targetting 2016 election.

Look, I love bitcoin and I was one of the earliest adopters of bitcoin (2009 Dec era). But I have been a software developer for far longer than that, and I can tell you, bitcoin's code is not made to make the things we desire to make now.

BTW, here is an argument against Ethereum. Any app built on it, will be inherently slow because of the price they'll pay for building it in a higher level abstraction platform. This means, that Augur will eventually hit performance wall, at which point, every successful Ethereum app will have to be developed in C/C++ and natively to get more performance.