Bitcoin vs Ethereum \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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3 sats \ 7 comments \ @pieceofpineaple 17 Sep 2021 bitcoin freebie

Would the flippening happen?

Ethereum is gaining massive support from institutions aside from Bitcoin. Most dApps are built on Ethereum, although the gas fees are sickening. Meanwhile, some think that Bitcoin is an outdated coin with outdated tech and is not eco-friendly.

Looking at long-term outlook, do you believe that ETH would flip BTC?

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14 sats \ 0 replies \ @nout 17 Sep 2021

I'll bite. No. I don't believe that in long-term it will flip BTC. I believe ETH has a smaller potential market than money.

not eco-friendly - money needs to be based on something valuable that's hard to get. If it would be easy to get then anyone would get it and make more of it (eventually). The hardest one to get is the one that wins over long-term in holding value as we have seen over centuries. To "get it" requires energy of some form and there's no way around that. The best suited form of energy is electricity, it doesn't require any mechanical/chemical BS and many other things can be reduced down to electricity anyway. Electricity can be made fully eco-friendly and so the fact that some electricity is not "eco-friendly" is a separate problem that needs a solution, but it doesn't really have that much to do with Bitcoin. I think we would agree that electricity is something useful and worth getting and using (lights in hospitals, refrigeration, A/C, entertainment...). So then the question is how much we value having trustless, open, decentralized, public monetary network. And I'd say the answer is that we value it exactly as much as how much energy we spend on it.

4 sats \ 0 replies \ @CypherPoet 17 Sep 2021

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Threads like these are good indicators that Bitcoin bull market insanity is imminent.

(Not to pick on the OP too much, though -- I think you just need to do more research and weigh the merits of these claims. Welcome to the show! 🙂).

3 sats \ 0 replies \ @02d10975a1 17 Sep 2021 freebie

Zero chance. I see Ethereum losing its second position, and soon it'll be lost in the sea of shitcoins, all of them trending towards zero against bitcoin.

2 sats \ 1 reply \ @gmd 17 Sep 2021

Seems more likely to me that Solana will eventually flip ETH...

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @cozy 17 Sep 2021

Yeah, that's the other thing with this flippening idea. It can be seen as an attack vector. If ETH flips BTC, then we'll always be wondering what's going to be flipping ETH, instead of trying to improve the best thing we've already got. Altcoins can be a great way to criticize Bitcoin, which is important for progress--but if they surpass Bitcoin, then they have already foreseen their own death--they must also be flippened.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @cozy 17 Sep 2021

Developers are politicians, in my opinion. Choosing to run different versions of the software is a vote. Paying transaction fees is paying taxes to the military of Bitcoin: the miners (security model). Politicians get money from lobbyists (sponsored by companies that depend on the Bitcoin ecosystem). In Bitcoin, the politicians are checked, then, by users and miners. I see criticism at a much more fundamental level, then, than on Ethereum. A "tradition of criticism" is the engine of all Western progress [of which Bitcoin is a part], and that you don't see in, say, Russia, China, North Korea etc.. IF they do go to proof-of-stake, where does accountability lie? Right now, I already feel there is no real accountability for lost funds and chain splits. Vitalik sort of disappears into the the ether (see what I did there) of his political "party," to maintain his status and his parties dominance (of which there is no competition). Where as, within Bitcoin there are REAL parties even within maximalists. Luke and Rubin have fundamentally different visions for the future of Bitcoin. I don't really see that so much in Ethereum--perhaps I could be wrong.

Then there is the fact that if it goes off PoW there is a whole different security model to consider (worth discussing attack vectors here, because they are similar to authoritarian abuses of power that we already see in oligarchical governance structures in meat space today). If they don't go off PoW, they will always be in Bitcoin's shadow (hashrate)--if Bitcoin fails, the same attack could be used on any other blockchain, with less effort, to shut it down. This is similar to a macro issue with western Democracy as well, which has led to unipolar international politics with The United States at the center (e.g. existential attacks on free markets and Democracy like 9/11 wouldn't happen anywhere else, can you imagine if the attack had been anywhere else?).