Ethereum vs Bitcoin! Let's have at it!Hey TradingView Traders, Investors and buddies!
I hope this idea comes at you having found yourself having a blessed weekend and a wonderful day!
Let’s dive in together as the two guerillas of ‘new money’ wage some ideological war throughout the publication below.
The term "Flippening" refers to the hypothetical moment of Ethereum (ETH) overtaking Bitcoin (BTC) as the biggest cryptocurrency. It may seem outrageous to think Ethereum will overtake the Bitcoin market cap, but let's go over the logic on why there is probability of this occuring.
Let’s dissect some fundamental headwinds for ETH vs Bitcoin by exploring the development of their networks current upgrades:
Fuel Fees. Under the current system, users send what’s known as a gas fee to miners as payment for transactions to be verified, in a kind of auction. Minders in current proof of work complete transactions by using computing power to solve puzzles on the network which create crypto and receive a piece of the fuel payment. Eth however has seen rampant growth, especially due to NFTs popularity and this is made evident with the block sizes consistently being near full. When the network gets busy the auction system of fuel fees enable users to bid up their transaction to essentially jump in que which leads to increased costs within the network.
Solution. EIP-1559 will address this issue during the “London hard fork”. With the new update the gas fees will be automatically determined with a base fee which will fluctuate according to network congestion. At this point an ETH user can simply compensate the miners with a “tip” if they need to jump in que. This isn’t the “end all, be all” solution, but as far as favorable fundamental tailwinds, the network will “burn” a chunk of the gas fee. This is essence ‘deflationary’ for eth. Bitcoin has gotten a lot of favor for having a ‘fixed’ supply, but if ETH continues to increase in popularity we could eventually see that more ether gets burned then generated for miners. I am of the humble opinion that this will result in a rise in the price of ether.
Additional Fundamental news – Eth 2.0
I have come across a great deal of misinformation about ETH 2.0, and a few points that I would like to clarify is first with a simple ‘visual’.
I once heard a psychologist say Sigmond Freud constructed a vast room of clarity when it came to psychology while Carl Jung excavated a mansion around that that room. In many ways ETH 2.0 is being built around ETH and simply will absorb it within the network. This seems very practical as it will make the transition very easy for users, and node operators. ETH 2.0 will make the platform radically swifter, more scalable by upgrading the mechanics of the network. The two biggest upgrades will be the transition of Proof of Work like Bitcoin to Proof of Stake like Cardano.
Bitcoin has miners competing to solve complex puzzles and they are then provided block rewards. As Turncoat T(M)usk (/sarc) has accurately stated Bitcoin energy consumption has skyrocketed. With the conversion to Proof of Stake ETH will validate transactions and ‘mine’ using the number of coins they are holding and willing to offer in essentially what amounts to an ‘escrow account’. This will colossally reduce the impact on the environment along with not only energy consumption but as Vitalik mentioned on the Lex Fridman podcast, hardware consumption as well.
Each Ether node operator has to stake 32 ether and then receive rewards. They mentioned on the podcast that this is actually MORE secure then Bitcoin as an attack on the network would costs more than the collective value of all stakes that had been submitted in the beacon chain in December – they mentioned essentially it would costs greater than $15 Billion Dollars’ worth of ETH.
The second upgrade will be “sharding” which was also mentioned in the podcast and within many research papers and articles. This will essentially entail new networks running parallel blockchains within the network. Vitalik himself described it as essentially taking a random 100 node operators and delegating them to come to consensus on a certain block, and then after they are all in agreement they are broken up into a new random sampling to come to consensus on a new block. Once they block has come to consensus it is “signed/authenticated” and linked to the main beacon chain. This will make it radically more efficient, reduce costs, increase scalability and improve the user experience and the experience of those staking the product. The users staking receive passive interest on their underlying deposit in the “escrow” account.
The benefits in conclusion will be energy/hardware consumption plummeting, more efficiency, a swifter more scalable network, a deflationary product that is burning ETH and rewards for those passively operating nodes which will encourage them to “stay long” to reap the rewards.
Bitcoin on the other hand is working on adding “the Lightening Network: as a second layer to the Bitcoin network which will enable transactions peer-to-peer off network “off chain transactions”. This has been in development by Thaddeus Dryha and Joseph Poon since 2015, and will be important for emerging markets especially. The benefits to the lightning network will be increased transaction time, and decreased costs for transactions.
The latency in the network which occurs when the network attempts to process simultaneous transactions has led to higher transaction fees as miners take longer to validate transactions. Also, participants can sometimes pay a higher fee to have their transactions processed faster very similar to ETH to essentially jump in que. Bitcoin's Lightning Network is supposedly going to help improve the processing times, build scalability, and lower the network's transaction fees. When the lightning network is in full swing the vision is for users to transfer Sats between each other without charges directly from digital wallets off-chain. Taking transactions ‘off-chain’ will improve the congestion ‘on-chain’ and will reduce the costs and improve the processing time.
There is a great deal of criticism about this upgrade. The primary criticism is that it will not actually solve the transaction fee issue. Although the lightning network allows payments between two parties, an opening transaction or deposit must be made via on-chain. The two parties then can process multiple transactions between each other, but once the bill has been settled, they need to record a closing transaction for the settled amount on the blockchain. There is a separate routing fee to transfer payments between channels. Since the fees for the lightning network are quite low, in theory, it should attract more participants. However, if the fees are so low for the routing of payments between nodes, there might not be any incentive for the nodes to facilitate the payments.
Another criticism is if there is congestion created through a malevolent attack. The idea originator Dryja himself stated, “forced expiration of many transactions may be the greatest systemic risk when using the lightning network.”
The final criticism is that we still are not addressing the rampant energy consumption of Bitcoin. I know proponents like Saylor are justifying this as essentially “well the internet itself uses a lot of energy”, “we want a lot of energy and costs associated with keeping the cleanest money in the world safe.” I will not dispute Saylor, but I also would certainly not call Bitcoin “clean”. We will see with the ETH 2.0 upgrade the energy cost reduce by 99% according to research papers. I have heard an analogy that if Bitcoin is consuming the energy of the city of all of London, following ETH 2.0 upgrade, Eth will be consuming the energy of a single tenant in an apartment in London.
The final comment I will make is simply the utility of the two financial products. ETH enables smart contracts, BTC enables ‘wealth transfers peer-to-peer.’ I will also say one benefit BTC has over ETH is that it is more decentralized than ETH is, and hopefully some of you can comment and add additional benefits that surely I may be missing.
Simply put, ETH is “smart money” and BTC is supposedly a “store of value” – personally though I rotated 99% of my BTC into ETH about 8 weeks ago and have happily not looked back.
This conversion was not because of simply the better upgrades instore for ETH, but rather due to Technical Analysis.
So let's peek at some TA on the daily so you can see the prices of each product at the moment of this idea being written:
In the green corner we have ETH at $2,688:
In the red corner we have BTC at $36,034
Lets simply look at the trends associated with Market Dominance.
We can clearly see below ETH above the EMA ribbon with the ribbon pointing up in a bullish trend.
We can clearly see below BTC below the EMA ribbon with the ribbon pointing down in a bearish trend of market dominance.
Final chart is a weekly ETC/BTC pair. I will state plainly that before looking at ETH overtaking the BTC dominance please notice the increase in volume and the trend as user growth has been exploding. Regardless of where you park your wealth I think good things are in store for both of these financial products.
I know many are very passionate about their favorite project, and I welcome competing ideology! The TradingView Community is remarkable and I have great respect for all you brilliant minds that provide new paradigms and perspectives. I certainly may be missing some key points so correct me if I am wrong, or let me know which other project you think is better than even these two that I should explore next.
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In a spirit of abundance I wish nothing but great fortunes upon you dear friends!
