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Does ETH have any significant advantage over Solana, Cardano or Polkadot except the much higher market cap? To me, they all seem be more or less the same, a bi

Does ETH have any significant advantage over Solana, Cardano or Polkadot except the much higher market cap? To me, they all seem be more or less the same, a bit like different Linux flavors. (If one would disappear, nobody would miss it, or?).

londons_explore 5y ago
Anyone can fork a coin and add a few minor features. Yet, the fork would have nearly zero value. And history has shown that coins with near zero value very soon have no users and die. That tells you that it isn't the features that give a cryptocurrency its value. The value is in the pool of users who believe it has value. The features of a cryptocurrency are in many ways irrelevant.
- tromp 5y ago
  > Yet, the fork would have nearly zero value. I'd like to believe that. But then I see projects like Bitcoin Gold that just replaced the PoW and enriched the authors with 100,000 coins and somehow it's valued at nearly $1B...
  - tata71 5y ago
    I see it the way I see New Mexico vs Mexico.
timmg 5y ago
> (If one would disappear, nobody would miss it). Makes you wonder what the value is, then. Interop between blockchains seems doable (I guess Coinbase, more or less, does this). At that point what makes one cryptocurrency worth more than another?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  The applications and communities built on top of each network as well as the security profile of the chain. There are thousands of applications that live on Ethereum, that have smart contracts controlling their treasuries, that have access to interoperable liquidity, that have established history and user base, etc.
hanniabu 5y ago
Yes, it hasn't taken any shortcuts or sacrifices to the blockchain trilemma. They have the best balance of decentralization, scalability, and security. Solana has made many sacrifices to decentralization and basically requires a super computer to operate a validator. As a result the chain is so centralized it actually went offline for a day which is unacceptable. Cardano is just a hot mess. They spent years in research to "fo things right from the get go" and since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made. Polkadot is pretty much following ethereum's rollup design but their downside is it's pretty much a vc chain like the others. Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared, just like nobody misses the previous wave of "eth killers" (eos, neo, tezos, lisk, etc). They come in with a huge marketing budget to mislead the likes knowledgeable mainstream, but the builders see through all that nonsense and as Palmer says, "developers, developers, developers".
- ghostwriter 5y ago
  > since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made. could you be more specific about Cardano issues?
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    One straight forward one is their scaling. They would bash ethereum's developers saying how stupid they are and cardano spent years on research papers without any practical experience to come up with off-chain payment channels. Just recently (a week ago?) They finally submitted and confirmed rollups were better and that they'd start working on those. But with their speed of development, grifting founder, and more interest in marketing than building, I don't expect them to finish any time soon or be relevant.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      Cardano does have significant benefits though. For example native tokens rather than wrapping things in smart contracts saves a lot of space, computation, and expense.
tracedddd 5y ago
It’s more like social networks. Sure you may have a similar (or better) Twitter but everyone is on Twitter so it’s hard to get any traction. If you do capture a significant number of real users than yes there’s not much difference. People will mention the fees or efficiency but the fact is a lot of the underdogs have not had to face any actual load so it’s easy to brag about low fees.
noman-land 5y ago
I think many people assume there will be a multi-chain universe, with some chains emerging as good for some applications and some for other. There will be private chains, too, and all these data need to be communicated across chains, which is already happening. I can't imagine that a clear winner would emerge any time soon or maybe ever.
grahamperich 5y ago
There are many, but the most obvious is that Ethereum is the oldest of the turing complete layer 1 blockchains, and it has an order of magnitude more core protocol developers and indie developers building on top of it. Same is true for developer tooling. The question in my mind is: will Ethereum's network effect buy it enough time to scale and get to an optimal "ETH 2.0" state where fees are negligible and throughput is high? Or will it be supplanted before then? My money is on the former, but it's certainly a question worth pondering! 3. Ethereum is far more secure in an adversarial environment. 51% attacking Ethereum would require more capital than performing a similar attack on other chains.
yokem55 5y ago
Solana, beyond the extreme hardware requirements to run a node, is deeply economically centralizing. It's more or less a standard delegated proof of stake stake system with one nasty twist - validators have to pay transaction fees to vote. At current sol prices this is about $100,000/year. This has some very big implications in a dpos system. In dpos, a validator gets validation slots proportional to their delegation and staking level, and you earn the transaction fees paid in those slots. More delegation, more slots, more fees earned from users and from other validators voting on the correctness of the chain. The net effect is that if your validator has a delegation level below the average of all the validators, you will bleed out your capital over time to validators that have an above average delegation. To add a nastier twist to this, the Solana foundation in their generosity, contributes delegation out of their Sol allocation to validators that they like. Essentially, the foundation gets to decide who will be a profitable validator and who won't.

londons_explore 5y ago

Anyone can fork a coin and add a few minor features. Yet, the fork would have nearly zero value. And history has shown that coins with near zero value very soon have no users and die. That tells you that it isn't the features that give a cryptocurrency its value. The value is in the pool of users who believe it has value. The features of a cryptocurrency are in many ways irrelevant.

tromp 5y ago
> Yet, the fork would have nearly zero value. I'd like to believe that. But then I see projects like Bitcoin Gold that just replaced the PoW and enriched the authors with 100,000 coins and somehow it's valued at nearly $1B...
- tata71 5y ago
  I see it the way I see New Mexico vs Mexico.

timmg 5y ago

> (If one would disappear, nobody would miss it). Makes you wonder what the value is, then. Interop between blockchains seems doable (I guess Coinbase, more or less, does this). At that point what makes one cryptocurrency worth more than another?

chrisco255 5y ago
The applications and communities built on top of each network as well as the security profile of the chain. There are thousands of applications that live on Ethereum, that have smart contracts controlling their treasuries, that have access to interoperable liquidity, that have established history and user base, etc.

hanniabu 5y ago

Yes, it hasn't taken any shortcuts or sacrifices to the blockchain trilemma. They have the best balance of decentralization, scalability, and security. Solana has made many sacrifices to decentralization and basically requires a super computer to operate a validator. As a result the chain is so centralized it actually went offline for a day which is unacceptable. Cardano is just a hot mess. They spent years in research to "fo things right from the get go" and since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made. Polkadot is pretty much following ethereum's rollup design but their downside is it's pretty much a vc chain like the others. Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared, just like nobody misses the previous wave of "eth killers" (eos, neo, tezos, lisk, etc). They come in with a huge marketing budget to mislead the likes knowledgeable mainstream, but the builders see through all that nonsense and as Palmer says, "developers, developers, developers".

ghostwriter 5y ago
> since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made. could you be more specific about Cardano issues?
- hanniabu 5y ago
  One straight forward one is their scaling. They would bash ethereum's developers saying how stupid they are and cardano spent years on research papers without any practical experience to come up with off-chain payment channels. Just recently (a week ago?) They finally submitted and confirmed rollups were better and that they'd start working on those. But with their speed of development, grifting founder, and more interest in marketing than building, I don't expect them to finish any time soon or be relevant.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    Cardano does have significant benefits though. For example native tokens rather than wrapping things in smart contracts saves a lot of space, computation, and expense.

tracedddd 5y ago

It’s more like social networks. Sure you may have a similar (or better) Twitter but everyone is on Twitter so it’s hard to get any traction. If you do capture a significant number of real users than yes there’s not much difference. People will mention the fees or efficiency but the fact is a lot of the underdogs have not had to face any actual load so it’s easy to brag about low fees.

noman-land 5y ago

I think many people assume there will be a multi-chain universe, with some chains emerging as good for some applications and some for other. There will be private chains, too, and all these data need to be communicated across chains, which is already happening. I can't imagine that a clear winner would emerge any time soon or maybe ever.

grahamperich 5y ago

There are many, but the most obvious is that Ethereum is the oldest of the turing complete layer 1 blockchains, and it has an order of magnitude more core protocol developers and indie developers building on top of it. Same is true for developer tooling. The question in my mind is: will Ethereum's network effect buy it enough time to scale and get to an optimal "ETH 2.0" state where fees are negligible and throughput is high? Or will it be supplanted before then? My money is on the former, but it's certainly a question worth pondering! 3. Ethereum is far more secure in an adversarial environment. 51% attacking Ethereum would require more capital than performing a similar attack on other chains.

yokem55 5y ago

Solana, beyond the extreme hardware requirements to run a node, is deeply economically centralizing. It's more or less a standard delegated proof of stake stake system with one nasty twist - validators have to pay transaction fees to vote. At current sol prices this is about $100,000/year. This has some very big implications in a dpos system. In dpos, a validator gets validation slots proportional to their delegation and staking level, and you earn the transaction fees paid in those slots. More delegation, more slots, more fees earned from users and from other validators voting on the correctness of the chain. The net effect is that if your validator has a delegation level below the average of all the validators, you will bleed out your capital over time to validators that have an above average delegation. To add a nastier twist to this, the Solana foundation in their generosity, contributes delegation out of their Sol allocation to validators that they like. Essentially, the foundation gets to decide who will be a profitable validator and who won't.