Bitcoin is the leading cryptocurrency today for good reason. It has the best security track record, brand recognition and liquidity. Bitcoin is emerging as an alternative monetary system and this is something the world sorely needs. We can already see its utility in countries where inflation is ravaging fiat currencies, such as parts of South America and Africa. Wherever currencies collapse, Bitcoin takes off. Unfortunately, there will be plenty more of this sort of chaos over the coming years. Bitcoin is the world’s leading contender to become the future of money. This is why many refer to bitcoin as “digital gold.”
Ethereum is different. It’s a platform that allows groups to launch decentralized applications (dApps). The potential applications of such a network are as broad as the internet. Ethereum has potential. But it has yet to find its killer application. So far, most of the action on the Ethereum network has been with initial coin offerings. Hundreds of cryptocurrency projects have launched on Ethereum, some look promising but none have truly taken off yet. The Ethereum network has struggled to keep up with demand during periods of high usage. To fix this, Ethereum plans to institute a dramatic upgrade in the near future. The upgrade will change almost everything about how Ethereum works. Hopefully this upgrade will let it scale to thousands of transactions per second. But there’s major work to be done yet, and nobody has built a system quite like this before.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is growing by leaps and bounds. Lightning has the potential to make Bitcoin an extremely viable and scalable payment system, even for small purchases. Lightning is just one of the many active scaling projects being worked on around the world. Ethereum has much further to go than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is already doing what it was built to do. Ethereum has the potential to be as big, or even bigger, one day, but it’s simply not there yet. Besides, Ethereum is about 1/5 the size of Bitcoin today.
For all those reasons, I cannot see Ethereum surpassing Bitcoin in value anytime soon!
Sven Franssen