> Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not, but if the valuation were to pass Bitcoin's I think it would be fair to state that it's because the market has chosen to prefer low security, low decentralisation, high (yet unrealized) innovation potential over a decentralized payment system.
It's kind of weird to compare Bitcoin to Ethereum. They are both blockchain-based, but they're in completely different categories. It's like comparing shares in Exxon to an account of Wells Fargo. Sure, you can use them both as a unit of accounting but they're not really the same.
Ethereum is an autonomous app hosting corporation. Bitcoin is an autonomous ledger hosting corporation. They will succeed in their respective markets based on demand for ledgers and apps, the utility of decentralization in those two spaces, and their usability relative to competitors.
Ethers can be used as a currency, but so can oil, corn, and Beenie Babies. Bitcoin's purpose is currency, and the ecosystem around it is optimized for that purpose.
Ethereum's purpose is executing computational contracts, and the ecosystem is optimizing for that. You can compare the two the way you compare boats and fish, but anyone who puts them in the same category without caveat is really missing the bigger picture.
Bitcoin has smart contracts. That's what people usually don't understand about ETH - its much more of an extension of Bitcoin and ColoredCoins than most people can ever realize. In fact this article shows exactly in what way this extension came up. Ethereum's history in two steps: 1) try to generalise Mastercoin 2) the same on its own blockchain. Grasping the internals of Bitcoin and its smart contracts capabilities is almost an requirement to understand ETH. Actually its very similar to going from assembly to a higher level language.
I worked on a Bitcoin project which in a strange turn of events led to Nick Szabo becoming an advisor there. But the limitations of Bitcoin are so large that all the attempts failed - Counterparty and Mastercoin were clearly never as succesfull as ETH for very good reasons.
"The Ethereum network is a distributed economy like Bitcoin, except it is much, much more powerful. The essential difference is that Ethereum is programmable. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to program a whole new currency like Bitcoin."
AFAIK it takes 5 minutes to fork Bitcoin and create a new altcoin. Why would I use ethereum for my altcoin instead of doing a new altcoin?
Here I thought it was from portraying Ethereum as solving the problems with Bitcoin but hand waving past the part where that’s remained vaporware for years and making the same kind of unspecified claims about innovative useful things Bitcoin salespeople have been making for the last decade. It should be easy to point to something real if it is that different.
It's interesting because for so many years, Ethereum was hailed as this ultra-resilient alternative to Bitcoin. Developed slowly and deliberately after Bitcoin had already gotten traction, it was supposed to fill in where Bitcoin couldn't.
Instead, it's proved to be far more chaotic and unreliable than Bitcoin at its worst hours. Building currencies (or a "decentralized smart contract platform") is hard.
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