If you ask anyone about the top cryptocurrencies at the moment, the answer will definitely be Bitcoin and Ethereum, followed by Ripple, Litecoin, Dash and so on. Most of them will also say that Ethereum will kick Bitcoin’s butt in the near future, thanks to its rapid growth. They are convinced that Ethereum is the currency of the future. But what are they missing?
For starters, both Bitcoin and Ethereum are two sides of the same coin. One you call ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ when it’s tossed. There is always a differentiating factor between heads and tails. The same holds good for Bitcoin and Ethereum too. While both Bitcoin and Ethereum platforms implement blockchain, that’s where most of the similarities end. They both have different purposes and they are fundamentally different from each other, in terms of use, purpose and even the protocols used.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to come into existence, no dispute there. But, it was created as a decentralized open source digital currency for peer to peer transaction of monetary value. To make it even more simple, the creation of bitcoin can be equated to the creation of money. Now if you have read about the qualities of ideal money , then you will know that Bitcoin satisfies all of them.
Now, what about Ethereum? The Ethereum protocol is a late comer to the cryptocurrency game and rightly so, because the whole concept of Ethereum is not built with just the blockchain, but blockchain 2.0 and blockchain 3.0 in mind. Ethereum is not a monetary platform but a smart contracts or blockchain-based applications platform. Then the next obvious question, why does ether have a value associated with it, if it doesn’t have any monetary purpose? Ether is a necessary evil, which one has to put up with for multiple […]
