By
Benjamin Njiri
April 23rd, 2024
Ethereum is the world’s second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization and is loved by crypto exchanges and is listed with most crypto pairs, more than any other coin, but Bitcoin.
As Ethereum rocketed up to nearly 1, 400 dollars in the same December period – when Bitcoin reached a peak of more than 20, 000 dollars, it is considered a valuable store.
For it’s creator, Vitalik Buterin, his project holds many advantages over Bitcoin, and he proudly illustrated with simple words why his “second generation blockchain” has enough merits to be the most important altcoin in the global market.
If it’s to believe ConsenSys, the Alliance of Ethereum, smart contracts and ICOs – Ethereum is performing better than Bitcoin.
Buterin: “I Was Quite Involved in Bitcoin Industry”
He explained that he was initially quite involved in the Bitcoin community. Over a period of about two years, he not only began to actively participate in the community but also engaged in various crypto-related projects until he eventually left the university to become fully involved in activities related to the development of blockchain technologies.
He later realized that Bitcoin could evolve. He began to study the possibility to expand the capabilities of Bitcoin but eventually decided to take one step further, developing a new, more efficient blockchain. The evolution that began with the Ethereum project opened a framework of options for users in the same way that smartphones changed the way society behaves.
He wanted to explain how he got to an idea of Ethereum as such. He said:
“Soon after (dropping the university) I started to realize there were a lot more interesting things that you could do with blockchains than just a single peer to peer currency. And it was something that other people were starting to recognize at the same time.
I came up with the idea behind Ethereum, this idea that blockchain was a built-in programming language as kind of what I thought was the simplest and most logical way to actually build a platform that can be used for many more kinds of applications”.
Vitalik compared the differences between both blockchains as the ones of a pocket calculator vs. a Smartphone. While BTC can do one thing very well, ETH -being Turing complete- gives users and developers a broader framework of possibilities thanks to Smart contracts and dApps.
He said:
“Think of the difference between something like a pocket calculator and a smartphone, where a pocket calculator does one thing, and it does one thing well. But really, people want to do all these other things. And if you have a smartphone, then you have a pocket calculator as an app, you have a music player as an app, you have a web browser as an app, and pretty much everything else.”
This, however, is not the first time Vitalik has spoken negatively of Bitcoin. Last week he tweeted about XRP, stating that “it’s better sound money than Bitcoin.”
Also, we already wrote how, after two delays, Ethereum was finally able to implement its Constantinople hard fork, a previously elusive milestone. This achievement begins the path to ETH 2.0 and could be the first step to accomplish a scalable, fast and efficient blockchain, with the capacity to process up to 1 million TPS.
Just for a reminder, the Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks are a major amendment to the Ethereum network, as they will increase its efficiency and affect the network’s core protocol specifications, contract standards, and client APIs. The Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks strive to reduce block reward issuance from 3 to 2 ETH. What is more, users can expect cheaper transaction fees for some operations on the Ethereum network.