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It will take significant time and effort to overtake Bitcoin's name recognition and first mover advantage. However, there's also an advantage to being a second

by lend000 10y ago

It will take significant time and effort to overtake Bitcoin's name recognition and first mover advantage. However, there's also an advantage to being a second mover that can adapt quickly to a changing environment... I doubt Bitcoin will be the supreme crypto-currency in a few years. It's just too implausible that Bitcoin is perfect enough as is, and/or the community will be able to implement any needed changes before its "competitors" take market share. Regardless, it's a good time to be a cryptocurrency investor. We're still in 1996 in Dot Com Bubble time.

appetizer 10y ago
Name recognition lol, there's a significant advantage to not being called bitcoin.
agandy 10y ago
Agreed on bitcoin not being the perfect solution for crypto. I think Ethereum has a ton of potential in this regard. Smart contracts have many applications and provided the developer community around Ethereum continues growing, I see no reason why it won't overtake Bitcoin within the next 10 years.
- repomies6991 10y ago
  All this smart contract talk makes me somewhat sceptical. There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening. Can you name any cool smart contract use cases?
  - darkFunction 10y ago
    The problem with smart contracts is that of defining trustless "oracles", or, how do you get data in and out of the network without relying on vulnerable points of centralisation. As soon as you require information about something other than the internal state of the chain, you have a problem. I believe some companies are attempting to implement solutions at the moment but I'm not familiar with the technology. Crowd-funding is an already popular use case for blockchain contracts, as well as the creation of tradable tokens built on top of the platform. Decentralised exchanges are a nice idea but to my knowledge they are outclassed by the speed of centralised servers. Decentralised, "fair" casinos (such as Edgeless) are also possible with smart contracts but I think they won't be able to compete with traditional casinos that have an edge but offer large and enticing welcome bonuses. For a quick overview of some of Ethereum's Dapps you can look at: http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ http://dapps.ethercasts.com/
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - splintercell 10y ago
    > There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening. Replacing X, when X is a task performed by a human is not an easy task for any technology. Take for instance Automobiles replaced Horse Cab drivers, but it created Automobile drivers. So have cars really replaced the drivers? In a way they have, and in a way they haven't. Today Smart contracts are being used to performed mostly financial transactions. Our main problem remains the same what it was in front of the Internet in early days. They wanted their refrigerator to be able to automatically order milk once it runs out of it, but it turned out that IoT wasn't even a thing then. On the other hand, replacing telegrams and faxes with email was a lot easier task. Doing things which have no pre-internet equivalence (for instance camming) were a lot more easily integrated. Same here, the main and the easiest use of Smart Contracts would be in the fields where there is no current usage exists. Currently Smart contracts are being used for some lightweight usages for instance performing trades of cryptocurrencies. Today ENS is launched where they are using Smart Contracts to implement domain registry systems. Tomorrow maybe decentralized uber would be made possible. None of these tasks are really 'replace a lawyer' tasks.
Taek 10y ago
Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure, safest option of all the cryptocurrencies, including the nasty miner situation happening right now. Ethereum is in second place, but the dev team has worked hard to maintain full control over the direction of the protocol, including frequent hardforks and promise of future hardforks. Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not, but if the valuation were to pass Bitcoin's I think it would be fair to state that it's because the market has chosen to prefer low security, low decentralisation, high (yet unrealized) innovation potential over a decentralized payment system. I wouldn't consider it a bad thing for bitcoin, and I also wouldn't consider Bitcoin dead or misplaced if it gets passed by ethereum in market cap. The decentralization is what is meaningful to me, and I don't know anything else remotely close.
- pferdone 10y ago
  I would like to hear your opinion why you think Bitcoin is more secure than Ethereum.
  - tudorconstantin 10y ago
    For example they had that bug last year where somebody was able to steal 50 million dollars equivalent ether from the network. IIRC that caused one of the hard forks and is the reason there are now both eth and etc. That was a bug in the DAO protocol. I'm not aware of any bugs in the btc protocol to allow hackers to steal money in their entire 8 years existence
    - verroq 10y ago
      It wasn't a bug with the protocol though. It was a bug with the coding of the contract. However there has been a few forks to mitigate DDoS attacks.
mrb 10y ago
Bitcoin doesn't need to be perfect to remain #1. Just needs to be good enough.
- bitcoinstudent 10y ago
  I don't think that's really true... it was true for things like TCP, http, and email, which had massive network effects and little competition at their start. But Bitcoin is already only 60% of the total market cap of all cryptos. While bitcoin was already a monopoly, Ethereum came from nowhere to become 1/3 its size (and growing). "Good enough" is not good enough here. Competition is alive and well. Without active development, it will stagnate. We've already seen that start.
  - charsifood 10y ago
    How much of ETH's price is propped up by speculation? I don't know of any stores that take ETH, while plenty take BTC. BTC also completely runs the economy of the DarkNet. I believe all cryptocurrencies are somewhat propped up by speculation, but BTC is still the preferred currency for the vast majority of people using cryptocurrencies for the actual exchange of goods and services. That's how BTC derives its value (+ speculation, but very few people are willing to speculate at $1500 USD per coin). As for the other cryptocurrencies, I would say that a lot of their value comes from people wishing to get in on the next "BTC" for $20-$80/coin.
    - sanswork 10y ago
      You can't judge any cryptocurrency by the number of stores that accept it because they all fail at that. Go to any random city and you can probably count the number of locations that take bitcoin on one hand and half of those probably haven't done a transaction in so long that they won't remember how to do it.
      - charsifood 10y ago
        I'm judging the value of a cryptocurrency by how many tangible goods and services I can extract from it. That is the entire function of a currency. I can pay for my VPN and my cloud servers with BTC. I can meet up with people locally and sell BTC for cash [effortlessly]. I can't do that with any other cryptocurrency. I'm not at all judging the technical merits of one cryptocurrency versus another.
runeks 10y ago
It should be noted that the Bitcoin protocol is more difficult to change, compared to other crypto currencies, simply because it's the most widely used. The more users/implementations a protocol has, the more expensive change will be, simply because it affects more users (more software needs to be rewritten). Similarly, changing the SQL protocol is orders of magnitude more difficult than changing, say, the GraphQL protocol, but does that mean GraphQL is likely to take over SQL? Or is it just a symptom of the fact that SQL is more popular than GraphQL in the first place? A crypto currency that no one uses is really easy to change, because no one will be affected. Framing this as a significant competitive advantage, however, misses the point, since the nimbleness is a direct result of no one using it.
- chii 10y ago
  Sql is a bad example, because you don't have to follow the new sql standard if you choose not to. Your existing app will continue to work on existing databases that implement the old SQL standard. A more salient example is the TCP/IP protocol! You cant juat update it, since it's required for everyone to agree on it!
  - runeks 10y ago
    I agree with you, but I wasn't commenting on that aspect of it. I was pointing out that popular protocols are much harder to change than unpopular ones. But claiming that this fact will cause the unpopular protocols to take over the popular ones doesn't make much sense. By that logic the least popular protocol is the most likely to win -- completely backwards, as far as I can see.

by lend000 10y ago

appetizer 10y ago

Name recognition lol, there's a significant advantage to not being called bitcoin.

agandy 10y ago

Agreed on bitcoin not being the perfect solution for crypto. I think Ethereum has a ton of potential in this regard. Smart contracts have many applications and provided the developer community around Ethereum continues growing, I see no reason why it won't overtake Bitcoin within the next 10 years.

repomies6991 10y ago
All this smart contract talk makes me somewhat sceptical. There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening. Can you name any cool smart contract use cases?
- darkFunction 10y ago
  The problem with smart contracts is that of defining trustless "oracles", or, how do you get data in and out of the network without relying on vulnerable points of centralisation. As soon as you require information about something other than the internal state of the chain, you have a problem. I believe some companies are attempting to implement solutions at the moment but I'm not familiar with the technology. Crowd-funding is an already popular use case for blockchain contracts, as well as the creation of tradable tokens built on top of the platform. Decentralised exchanges are a nice idea but to my knowledge they are outclassed by the speed of centralised servers. Decentralised, "fair" casinos (such as Edgeless) are also possible with smart contracts but I think they won't be able to compete with traditional casinos that have an edge but offer large and enticing welcome bonuses. For a quick overview of some of Ethereum's Dapps you can look at: http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ http://dapps.ethercasts.com/
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- splintercell 10y ago
  > There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening. Replacing X, when X is a task performed by a human is not an easy task for any technology. Take for instance Automobiles replaced Horse Cab drivers, but it created Automobile drivers. So have cars really replaced the drivers? In a way they have, and in a way they haven't. Today Smart contracts are being used to performed mostly financial transactions. Our main problem remains the same what it was in front of the Internet in early days. They wanted their refrigerator to be able to automatically order milk once it runs out of it, but it turned out that IoT wasn't even a thing then. On the other hand, replacing telegrams and faxes with email was a lot easier task. Doing things which have no pre-internet equivalence (for instance camming) were a lot more easily integrated. Same here, the main and the easiest use of Smart Contracts would be in the fields where there is no current usage exists. Currently Smart contracts are being used for some lightweight usages for instance performing trades of cryptocurrencies. Today ENS is launched where they are using Smart Contracts to implement domain registry systems. Tomorrow maybe decentralized uber would be made possible. None of these tasks are really 'replace a lawyer' tasks.

Taek 10y ago

Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure, safest option of all the cryptocurrencies, including the nasty miner situation happening right now. Ethereum is in second place, but the dev team has worked hard to maintain full control over the direction of the protocol, including frequent hardforks and promise of future hardforks. Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not, but if the valuation were to pass Bitcoin's I think it would be fair to state that it's because the market has chosen to prefer low security, low decentralisation, high (yet unrealized) innovation potential over a decentralized payment system. I wouldn't consider it a bad thing for bitcoin, and I also wouldn't consider Bitcoin dead or misplaced if it gets passed by ethereum in market cap. The decentralization is what is meaningful to me, and I don't know anything else remotely close.

pferdone 10y ago
I would like to hear your opinion why you think Bitcoin is more secure than Ethereum.
- tudorconstantin 10y ago
  For example they had that bug last year where somebody was able to steal 50 million dollars equivalent ether from the network. IIRC that caused one of the hard forks and is the reason there are now both eth and etc. That was a bug in the DAO protocol. I'm not aware of any bugs in the btc protocol to allow hackers to steal money in their entire 8 years existence
  - verroq 10y ago
    It wasn't a bug with the protocol though. It was a bug with the coding of the contract. However there has been a few forks to mitigate DDoS attacks.

mrb 10y ago

Bitcoin doesn't need to be perfect to remain #1. Just needs to be good enough.

bitcoinstudent 10y ago
I don't think that's really true... it was true for things like TCP, http, and email, which had massive network effects and little competition at their start. But Bitcoin is already only 60% of the total market cap of all cryptos. While bitcoin was already a monopoly, Ethereum came from nowhere to become 1/3 its size (and growing). "Good enough" is not good enough here. Competition is alive and well. Without active development, it will stagnate. We've already seen that start.
- charsifood 10y ago
  How much of ETH's price is propped up by speculation? I don't know of any stores that take ETH, while plenty take BTC. BTC also completely runs the economy of the DarkNet. I believe all cryptocurrencies are somewhat propped up by speculation, but BTC is still the preferred currency for the vast majority of people using cryptocurrencies for the actual exchange of goods and services. That's how BTC derives its value (+ speculation, but very few people are willing to speculate at $1500 USD per coin). As for the other cryptocurrencies, I would say that a lot of their value comes from people wishing to get in on the next "BTC" for $20-$80/coin.
  - sanswork 10y ago
    You can't judge any cryptocurrency by the number of stores that accept it because they all fail at that. Go to any random city and you can probably count the number of locations that take bitcoin on one hand and half of those probably haven't done a transaction in so long that they won't remember how to do it.
    - charsifood 10y ago
      I'm judging the value of a cryptocurrency by how many tangible goods and services I can extract from it. That is the entire function of a currency. I can pay for my VPN and my cloud servers with BTC. I can meet up with people locally and sell BTC for cash [effortlessly]. I can't do that with any other cryptocurrency. I'm not at all judging the technical merits of one cryptocurrency versus another.

runeks 10y ago

It should be noted that the Bitcoin protocol is more difficult to change, compared to other crypto currencies, simply because it's the most widely used. The more users/implementations a protocol has, the more expensive change will be, simply because it affects more users (more software needs to be rewritten). Similarly, changing the SQL protocol is orders of magnitude more difficult than changing, say, the GraphQL protocol, but does that mean GraphQL is likely to take over SQL? Or is it just a symptom of the fact that SQL is more popular than GraphQL in the first place? A crypto currency that no one uses is really easy to change, because no one will be affected. Framing this as a significant competitive advantage, however, misses the point, since the nimbleness is a direct result of no one using it.

chii 10y ago
Sql is a bad example, because you don't have to follow the new sql standard if you choose not to. Your existing app will continue to work on existing databases that implement the old SQL standard. A more salient example is the TCP/IP protocol! You cant juat update it, since it's required for everyone to agree on it!
- runeks 10y ago
  I agree with you, but I wasn't commenting on that aspect of it. I was pointing out that popular protocols are much harder to change than unpopular ones. But claiming that this fact will cause the unpopular protocols to take over the popular ones doesn't make much sense. By that logic the least popular protocol is the most likely to win -- completely backwards, as far as I can see.