Ethereum: harder, better, faster, stronger
More often then not I hear the EOS hype train coming by with the usual phrase that EOS is 'the Ethereum killer'.
Although EOS might be a very good project and deliver outstanding results in the future, I don't see it 'killing' Ethereum (ETH) any time soon.
Why? Or rather... why not?
It is not so much related to EOS or any other upcoming platform as it has to do with ETH. In this post I will be covering why, in my opinion, ETH is rallying and will continue to rally in price going forward.
- Scaling - Yes, currently ETH is only able to process twice as many transactions as bitcoin. However, this will change with the Raiden network which is a technology that allows off-chain transaction similar to the Lighting network for Bitcoin. The amount of transactions could be increased to 1,000,000 per second!
The website of the Raiden network provides a good overview of the advantages:
"Scalable: it scales linearly with the number of participants (1,000,000+ transfers per second possible)
- Fast: Transfers are confirmed and final within the fraction of a second
- Confidential: Single transfers don’t show up in the global shared ledger
- Interoperable: Works with any token that follows Ethereum’s standardized token API
- Low Fees: Transaction fees can be 7 orders of magnitude lower than on the blockchain
- Micro-payments: Low transaction fees allow to efficiently transfer tiny values"
Privacy - I presume not many of the readers knew this until today or maybe until this very moment, but the Ethereum project has been working with the Zcash team to integrate the zk-SNARKs technology into ETH. This would completely anonymize transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The reason why the Ethereum team is doing this is clear as it clearly is a sought after feature. What the Zcash team is hoping to get out of it is still unclear to me, although one might argue the 2 teams have different goals, one as a smart contract platform for corporations and the other as a pure currency, aiming to replace or supplement fiat currencies.
Switch to Proof of Stake (PoS) - the move to PoS will not only make an impact on the way the currency is mined, but also to the amount that is mined. Currently the PoW algorithm is used and is causing the total of coins in circulation to increase as the PoW rewards are a lot higher than the gas that is being used for transactions. However once the PoS kicks in, the rewards will be reduced and we will be looking at a stable and limited amount of coins in circulation which Vitalik Buterin estimated to be close to 100 million.
Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) - The amount of ICO's coming out is reaching record highs at the moment. Many of these coins are using the Ethereum blockchain, require deposits to be made in ETH in most cases. Apart from the gas cost, which is tiny, investors need to buy ETH to invest in the ICO's of the issuers. Obviously this will eventually be sold back to the market again as we have seen with some of the other big ICO's in the past, but not all organisations can or will sell all deposited ETH right away. The higher demand will, at least in the short term, drive prices up and additionally raise the amount of investors that are using ETH, bringing it closer to BTC in terms of coin awareness.
Usability - The ease of spending ETH has increased substantially in over the past few months. More and more merchants are now allowing Ethereum as well as Bitcoin. This is true for more altcoins as well, but the point is that it is no longer just BTC being accepted and ETH is taking a large piece of the pie now as well.
These are few of many reasons why I am holding on to my ETH, even though the price has risen fast lately. In my opinion it is still massively undervalued compared to BTC, which has reached all-time highs this week, while ETH is nowhere near close to that yet.
If you a have any comments about what I posted above or have different opinions, I would really like to hear them below. And of course if you like what you have read today, stay tuned for the next one!
Images:
https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/ethereum
https://cointelegraph.com/news/trends-bitcoin-continues-to-struggle-ethereum-looks-strong
References:
https://lightning.network/
http://raiden.network/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-price-can-reach-2000-if-this-happens
https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5izcf5/lets_talk_about_the_projected_coin_supply_over/dbc66rd/
Not to mention the Ethereum Alliance. For those of you that are not aware, the Ethereum Alliance is a pact made by several large finance companies (Cisco, Mastercard to name a few) in which they have agreed to build on and promote an ethereum-based future for finance
Oh I think Ethereum is definitely an excellent and long term choice. It has some kind of 'first mover advantage' like Bitcoin, being the first of it's kind and the biggest. A LOT of things are being built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and neither those nor Ethereum are going anywhere anytime soon. If EOS is going to pose a challenge, then it won't be for another two years. And even then, there will likely be situations where using Ethereum is preferrable (or not worse) to EOS.
But in 2-3 years, EOS could be a contender. That's not to say it's going to cost Ethereum anything per se, but it does mean EOS has significantly more room to grow than Ethereum since its still at a low cost by comparison. That's why traders looking to make it big generally are more enthusiastic about EOS. Very little to do with technology, much more with the profits expected.
upvote and resteemed. You are really a great writer attalis. You will Level up fast here on Steemit. Cheers.
Thank you so much for that. People like yourself make my day. Thanks and looking forward to some of your future content!
Mine won't be as detailed and well thought out as yours, but you should get a laugh now and then. I post a lot of pictures of the kids.
Each there own. I appreciate different kinds of content. otherwise its just boring. I just posted a new one, which I consider my best sofar, though would appreciate our opinion when you have some time. Cheers!
Please let me know your opinion here guys. Do you think Ethereum is here to stay? Will it overtake BTC? Or will it be swallowed by other more promising coins?
I don't see ethereum going anywhere, however the real battle may end up being with NEO. I hear Vitalek is getting pretty fluent in Mandarin though.
Great points! I do need to learn more about EOS but from what I have studied about ETH it is amazing
so you think ETH > BTC in ? years
in terms of technology it already is. In terms of price, dont think so yet. I do think it going to grow lot faster than BTC.