Hey Steemians! I wanted to talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum today. Seems like everyone has these two pegged as the big dogs of cryptocurrency. Will we see these two battle it out for the top spot in market cap rankings or will we end up seeing some other coin take the throne, Litecoin or IOTA or maybe even Bitcoin Cash?
Let's dive into a small comparison of the two coins.
Bitcoin has the first movers advantage over Ethereum, having been the first to market and remaining the top dog for basically the lifetime of cryptocurrencies, it was first and is to date still the go to cryptocurrency. When I talk about cryptocurrencies with the general public, i.e. friends or family they generally know what Bitcoin is but usually have never heard of Ethereum. This is because Ethereum is still relatively new to the cryptocurrency space when we compare it with other coins such as Litecoin or even the infamous Dogecoin. But even these coins face the same issue as Ethereum of being relatively unknown.
Bitcoin is rapidly gaining attention in the public eye. Friends that never cared about investing in Bitcoin before, have now been asking me over the past two months how they can start. When I mention to them that they should invest 60% into bitcoin and 40% into Ethereum, they usually say no I just want Bitcoin.
Ethereum on the other hand has "in my opinion" a technological advantage. Not only does it have much faster transaction times but it also has a much more unified voice behind it, the voice of founder Vitalik Buterin. Compared to Bitcoin whose founder Satoshi Nakamoto is missing in action, Vitalik is the de-facto face of Ethereum, what he says usually goes. (We know what would happen if he were to suddenly disappear, I'm sure many of you remember the flash crash on the fake news of his death). There is no concern of a fork every month because everyone looks to Vitalik, whatever chain he is supporting is Ethereum. In-fact the Ethereum blockchain also had a hard fork recently, does anyone even remember the old chain? Another way Vitalik and the Ethereum team have prevented the fork wars is by implementing something called ice-age. This is when an old chain has not been forked or updated in for a long period the chain begins to increase it's mining difficulty. In the end we can see Vitalik is working hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes Bitcoin has made and is making.
Ethereum being a platform instead of a currency has to however, find it's own way to the top. Currently Ethereum is facing issues with it's so called "killer app", the ICO. ICOs are raising millions of US dollars worth of Ethereum daily. This money is quickly being flipped to fiat (normal currency) to start development of these companies. This works out amazingly for the tokens generated on the Ethereum platform but doesn't seem to be helping the value of Ether. ICOs are causing rapid liquidity of Ethereum making it very difficult for it to gain in value, since there is so much available for a user to buy.
Ofcourse we might never see Ethereum pass bitcoin in terms of value. This is because of it's circulating supply, but there is a chance in the long run as Ethereum becomes more widely known and it's adoption increases. We may see it eventually topple Bitcoin in the market cap rankings. For now however Ethereum will continue to battle it out with one of the more popular forks of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash.
Thanks again for reading, hopefully some of you learned something new about Bitcoin or Ethereum here. If I made any mistakes or missed something important about the two coins, please let me know!