It's a shame people don't understand that there's multiple aspects. Ethereum is much more decentralized, secure, have more dev mindshare, better community, tooling, and ecosystem. Let's also not forget that Algorand is powered by and centralized around team-run nodes.
I don't think the initial "It's a shame more people..." is meant to make people forget about Ethereum. I think it's to signal that not a lot of people know about Algorand, and doesn't anything about other projects.
Since you seem to indicate that you know what you're talking about, care enough to make a proper argument? You say Ethereum is more decentralized, secure and better tooling, but you never actually make a cohesive argument, only giving a list of "reasons" without any backing. I'm mostly interested in why you think Ethereum is "more secure" than Algorand, and what threat model are you considering here even?
> Algorand is powered by and centralized around team-run nodes
Hm, I run a Algorand node but I don't work for the Algorand team. What do you mean that Algorand is run by team-run nodes really? How do you even know which node belongs to who in the first place?
> 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.
There you go. I think this is like the 10000th time we have seen the point that Ethereum is let down by the high transaction costs and it being unsuitable for micro-transactions.
Everyone knows that, and alternatives like Algorand exist for that purpose.
Ethereum's main selling point is it lets you issue illegal unregistered securities. => Well that is the whole point of being decentralized. Anyone can do anything allowed by EVM.
Also the lead developer is some kid who believes very much in moving fast and breaking things. This philosophy may work for a social network site but not for other people's money.
=> Well they have improved significantly. There are 3 implementations - one each in cpp, go and py. There are multiple miner implementation. It is significantly more mature and many people involved. See https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum for example.
'terrible bugs'? there was one terrible bug a long time ago
Additionally the size of its blockchain has already passed Bitcoin. It's file size is growing so fast and will pose a serious technical problem. => Storage is not a problem. We get TB size drives now. Most people use online wallets. There are various pruning measures which reduce the size significantly. There are many proposals to handle scaling if it were to become bottleneck.
The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin (for those who don't know, ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution) and the development ecosystem is much more vibrant and promising.
To be fair, ethereum is a newer, and more experimental platform- It has many arguable advantages over Bitcoin, but as an etherean I am happy to agree that right now Bitcoin is more established and also may be somewhat more decentralized (given that the ethereum community is giving some deference to the core team at this early stage, in the future this will likely no longer be true)
Let me get this straight, you think I’m saying that because Algorand is faster, cheaper, and more energy efficient than Bitcoin and Ethereum, that that makes it ok that Bitcoin and Ethereum are slow, expensive, and inefficient?
Have you never gone through the exercise of comparing alternatives before? Or evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competing technologies?
Proponents of Ethereum ignore the fact that Ethereum fails to address any of the most significant problems in Bitcoin. Bitcoin's major advantage is decentralization, and it's about the only thing that Bitcoin does better than anything else. Bitcoin is an extremely expensive way to build a financial system, and there's no reason to go through the trouble unless you are utilizing the decentralization.
Bitcoin's major problems are scale, miner centralization, and developer centralization. Ethereum is worse than Bitcoin in all three respects. Transactions on Ethereum are heavier, develoepment is very heavily controlled by the Ethereum foundation and by Consensys, and the block algorithm in Ethereum more strongly favors larger miners as compared to Bitcoin (which already favors bigger miners).
Further, the Ethereum develoepment team is under qualified. There have been several ametuer mistakes, including allowing negative balance, leaking private keys, and putting consensus at risk by advocating that different users should be running different consensus codebases. Most of the highly capable developers in the cryptocurrency ecosystem avoid Ethereum because it's not been constructed well, nor does it's design suggest strong resistance to adversarial environments.
Bitcoin did go through similar growing pains. Bitcoin did have many ametuer mistakes when getting started. But those have all been fixed, and there is a positively enormous amount of competent mindshare powering Bitcoin, and the thoroughness of decentralization in Bitcoin is unmatched by any altcoin, including Ethereum.
Ethereum has offered a lot of cool tricks with its turing complete scripting language, but is standing on a house of cards. It scales less well than Bitcoin, it's design more heavily promotes centralization, it's development is more ametuer, and the potential applications offered by its fancy scripting language are not actually that much stronger than what you can do with Bitcoin. The showcase applications such as Augur and Slockit suffer from weak cryptographic fundamentals and under-qualified developers even worse than Ethereum does.
> Ethereum will probably always outshine the other "Global Turing Machines" because it was the first. We don't really need another one—assuming it can adapt to changes in efficiency with hard-forks as needed.
The Ethereum network has much larger and complex technical aspirations than the Bitcoin network.
I'm okay that its only lead by a few people, that they did a rollback, etc. We are in the earliest days of decentralized infrastructure; laying the foundations for something that can physically last forever is more important following stringent, irreversible protocols. Ethereum as of today has many limitations, but has a chance to literally be THE future of decentralized computing. It's worth trading whatever we have now for a chance at that future.
It's a shame people don't understand that there's multiple aspects. Ethereum is much more decentralized, secure, have more dev mindshare, better community, tooling, and ecosystem. Let's also not forget that Algorand is powered by and centralized around team-run nodes.
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