Confused whether to invest in bitcoin or ethereum? Read our analysis, including comments from cryptocurrency experts at Blockshow Asia…
How is bitcoin different from ethereum?
Contrary to what most people think, I don’t think bitcoin and ethereum are actually competitors. At most, they share only one thing, and that is, they are both built with blockchain technology. But that’s it. Everything else from there is completely different. Saying that they are the same and that they compete, in my mind is like saying Exxon Mobil is the same as Netflix or that somehow they compete just because they are both companies. It just doesn’t work like that.
Companies come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, and they target different audiences, and they operate in different markets. For example, Airbnb is going after the hotel market, Uber is disrupting taxis, Amazon is going after retail, and bitcoin is disrupting money.
In my opinion, the properties of bitcoin such as its limited supply, its supply and demand economics, and its massive decentralization make it the absolute king of all payment systems and other forms of money that exist on the planet today, such as fiat currencies like the US dollar and Euro), precious metals like gold and silver, or even other payment-based cryptocurrencies like litecoin, dash or ripple.
So if bitcoin is disrupting payments, then what is ethereum disrupting? At its simplest form, ethereum is disrupting legal contracts — the things that we use today to buy in to people, organizations, courts, and even government-based institutions together. That’s because ethereum was built with a different set of properties, most notably that it’s a programmable blockchain. This essentially means that you or I can actually write smart contracts and build stuff on top of ethereum. This includes literally anything from putting up your last will and testament onto ethereum to building a decentralized Twitter, or even…
