Ryan X Charles is the founder of the decentralized content sharing platform DATT and a former cryptocurrency engineer at social network Reddit.
In this opinion piece, Charles discusses why he is building his platform on the bitcoin protocol even despite the emergence of new blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. Since last summer when I announced Datt, an in-development social media platform and application powered by bitcoin, one of the top questions I’ve been asked is, "Why are you using bitcoin?"
Last year, this question often took a different form. I was asked "Why not use Stripe?” or "Why not make an altcoin?" Since the rally in Ethereum over the past few months, the question has morphed into "Why not use Ethereum?"
The answer is because Datt only needs Internet money right now, not advanced smart contracts, and switching to Ethereum would incur a large technical and economic cost which would ultimately fail to deliver a proportional return.
If we simply prioritize our feature set, we can and will add advanced smart contracts based on bitcoin when the time is right. Ethereum, at a protocol level, is arguably more advanced than bitcoin. Since it is Turing-complete, it has solved the limitation of the scripting language built into bitcoin.
However, the economy around Ethereum is much more limited than bitcoin, and therefore Ethereum is less useful for Datt. Possible paths
Because Ethereum has a very different protocol than bitcoin, it isn’t easy for bitcoin companies to add support for Ethereum.
Roughly speaking, bitcoin companies have three options: > Increase the technical complexity of their platform by adding Ethereum support to their bitcoin support Drop their assets in the bitcoin space but keep complexity limited by switching from bitcoin to Ethereum Solve the hard problems in bitcoin by designing and building complicated systems. Some companies will […]
