[Genghis Khan]

(10-14-2018 10:16 AM)redbeard Wrote:  

Fake news - ETH transaction count is inflated due to the millions of low-value dApp transactions.

"low-value"



Unless you can prove the larger ETH transaction count is due to zero-value transactions, the point stands.

Ethereum is used more than Bitcoin. I'm willing to reconsider if you can make a solid argument as to why most ETH transactions should be discounted.

Quote:

Avg. Transaction Value:
BTC: $21,000
ETH: $439

Do average values mean much unless they represent a normal distribution? Think about the simple case of 1 billionaire jacking up the average net worth of 100 people).

Regardless, assuming it is a normal distribution, what's the argument being made here with average transaction value? People send more $ per transaction through BTC than ETH? Great...and?

As an analogy:

A Ferrari costs more than a Toyota, but there are more Toyota vehicles on the road. So Toyota is more "used".

Toyota Motor Corporation's marketcap incidentally is also much higher than Ferrari N.V.'s.

So I'm not convinced transaction value means anything in regards to crypto marketcap or total user adoption/usage.

Quote:

If you had to guess, when do you think ETH could possibly flip BTC?

Good question. Honestly, no idea.

1. ETH did come awfully close in June 2016.

Snapshot on CoinMarketCap from June 18th shows:

• BTC marketcap of $43 bn.
• ETH marketcap of $35 bn.
  

2. To balance out JJG - here's some serious negatives about BTC:

I've made the historical argument before that technological first-movers don't end up as market leaders (think MySpace/FB, Archie(first search engine)/Google).

First movers usually fail because they're the first iteration. And first iterations tend to have fatal flaws that are only obvious in hindsight. So second/third/fourth iterations are required to get it "right".

I've seen this in countless technical fields, including my own. First ones to market often die out.

There are exceptions of course, but extremely few, and perhaps BTC will be of the exceptions.

However I doubt it - because to be an exception you need an exceptional leadership. Jeff Bezos of Amazon comes to mind - he was smart enough to realize Amazon had to evolve away from being just an online bookstore and become a general online retailer. Had he not been exceptionally smart, someone else would've come in with the idea of what Amazon is today and either crushed Bezos' books-only online website or made it into a niche website like jetpens.com.

Remind you of a certain first-mover cryptocurrency that should've added smartcontract options but didn't?

BTC actually has a huge problem in that sense - Satoshi Nakamoto, the genius behind Bitcoin, disappeared in 2014. Although not all facts are in, it's 99% certain Satoshi was in fact Hal Finney, who died in 2014.

Why is this an issue? Besides the founding genius is dead aspect, humans abhor a leadership vacuum. You can have a decentralized platform, but you cannot have a decentralized leadership structure. What we saw the past two years with Bitcoin and its contentious hard fork was the result of new people trying to become the leaders of Bitcoin. So we now got two camps: Bitcoin Core developers or Bitmain.

Bitcoin Core is compromised, and will not increase block size since it would negate Lightning, which is going to be their cash cow.

Bitmain on a long term scale will centralize PoW mining - they've been consistently gaining mining share. It'll make the entire decentralized aspect of Bitcoin a joke. Especially since the Chinese government can easily control Chinese companies.

So I'm supposed to believe Bitcoin is going to stay the #1 cryptocurrency? This despite the fact that it's the first iteration, the genius founder is dead, and the people left behind are more concerned about their own greed than advancing and pushing Bitcoin to the next level (the lack of progress in Bitcoin was the original catalyst for Vitalik to do Ethereum in the first place)?

I guess Bitcoin as digital gold is cool...until you realize you can buy actual physical gold as ERC20-tokens through Digix on top of Ethereum. Why buy digital gold when you can make gold digital?

Odds are not in Bitcoin's favor.

The fact is Bitcoin maximalists like JJG don't do themselves any favor by posting any positive news regarding Bitcoin's software development, despite it being extremely measly...I'm still waiting on a legitimate dApp being built on top of Bitcoin. And ignoring all the tremendously positive news that comes from the "alt-coin" space is a dangerous gambit to play.

If I really had to guess when ETH will overtake BTC, I'd put it around 2020-2021. The sheer volume of transactions and usage, as ramped up, through layer 2 scaling solutions in 2019, and through sharding in 2020 could make BTC transaction numbers look like a complete joke in comparison.

But I'm not a maximalist one way or another. Bitcoin doesn't excite me because I find it boring. In contrast, I find Ethereum a lot more fascinating. But unlike maximalists, I do see the value in blockchain/crypto projects that I might not find interesting personally. There is a possibility that BTC remains #1 for a very, very long time. I give that a small probability of happening, but a non-zero probability nevertheless. We'll see what happens.

It is something to ponder - what happens when a majority of people get bored with bitcoin, realizing all you can do is send transactions, and they discover other blockchain projects have much cooler things going on.

That meme though is on stand-by.