Game of Thrones warned us for years that winter was on the way and while it did finally arrive for the top-rated show, it was far more lackluster than anticipated and arguably less damaging than the crypto winter we just traipsed our way through.
Now that we’re in a bull market and seeing Bitcoin and Ether regaining lost ground, is it possible that the second place crypto could eventually overtake the reigning leader?
While it may seem farfetched at this point, especially with Bitcoin approaching $9k and ETH sitting just shy of $300, there are some key points that could mean big changes in the future.
1. Faster Than a Speeding… Snail?
First and foremost, when it comes to average transaction speed, ETH has Bitcoin beat hand’s down. You could watch almost an entire movie, admittedly not one from Marvel, in the 70 plus minutes a Bitcoin transaction can take, but you couldn’t even take a decent shower before your ETH settlement goes through.
Additionally, on average Bitcoin creates a new block every 10 minutes while Ethereum takes about 15 seconds for a block to mine.
When it comes to crypto being adopted by more mainstream consumers, speed is going to be of the essence.
2. The Price is Right
Short and sweet, ETH is by far a more economical choice as far as transaction fees. As of this writing, Bitcoin transactions will run you around 2.345 while Ethereum is a mere 0.104.
3. Versatility
Broken down to “brass taxes,” Bitcoin was created as an alternative to traditional fiat currency and therefore is forever limited to being a medium for storing and transferring money. Ethereum on the other hand, was developed as a platform for facilitating peer-to-peer contracts and applications via its own cryptocurrency. While ETH and Bitcoin are both digital currencies, Ether’s primary purpose is not to establish itself as a payment alternative as Bitcoin is, but to facilitate and monetize Ethereum in order to enable developers to design, build, and run distributed applications (ĐApps).
Even more impressive, one of the more significant tokens today comes from Ethereum and is known as ERC-20. ERC-20 defines a common list of rules that all Ethereum tokens must adhere to and as such, it empowers developers to accurately predict the functionality of new tokens within the Ethereum system as a whole.
For token implementation, ERC-20 has taken over as the technical standard for all smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and as of mid-April, there were more than 180,000 ERC-20 compatible tokens on the Ethereum main network.
4. No Limits
Bitcoin has a set supply of 21 million Bitcoins, of which 17 million has already been mined, which of course means that BTC is inherently limited by its very own nature. However, Ethereum has an unlimited supply and in order to keep inflation from ruining its value, new coin creation is tightly controlled.
5. Better Mining Decentralization
Lastly, Bitcoin’s hashing algorithm, SHA-256, can only be efficiently performed with special hardware, known as Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASICs). Ethereum uses a hashing algorithm known as Ethash and is memory intensive, making it much more difficult to build an economical special-purpose chip for and giving ETH a clear advantage on mining decentralization.
The pending hard fork from Ethereum will likely have an impact on ETH’s price point, but it’s anybody’s guess on which way it’ll go. After it’s all said and done, it’ll be awhile before ETH even approaches a possible takeover position, but these 5 points covered today show that if anyone has the power to overthrow the champion, Ethereum is the one and only.
– This article was originally posted at CryptoTraderNews
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