Despite being relatively new compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum prices have sky rocketed since its invention in 2015. In fact, if you bought an Ethereum during 2015 for 1$ your revenue would be 685$ today. Although starting out with a market cap less than 100 million $, today Ethereum's market cap is over 68 billion $ which places it at the 2nd spot in terms of market cap among cryptocurrencies. So as such a largely successful crptocurrency, many have wondered whether Ethereum is better than Bitcoin?
1)Storing value
Firstly, there is a limited amount of Bitcoins that can be mined. The maximum amount of Bitcoins that can be produced is 21 million Bitcoins. This means that once that limit is reached, there will be no more mine-able Bitcoins. This will cause a great surge in Bitcoin prices.
Ethereum on the other hand has no limit on the amount of coins that can be produced.So Ethereum will continue to release the same amount of Ether on a regular basis forever, so its supply will remain constant and expanding.
2)Transactions
Although Bitcoin's storing value are better than Ethereum, Ethereum is the preferred method of transferring wealth. In fact, Ethereum has overtook Bitcoin in terms of daily transactions since mid 2017. This is because Bitcoin transactions take longer to be confirmed on the Blockchain compared to Ethereum, causing it to be more expensive mining fees and slower transactions. Ethereum is built to be more efficient than Bitcoin, partly through virtue of being a newer and more optimized cryptocurrency.
3)Supply
The reward for mining Bitcoin halves about every four years and it is currently valued at 12.5 bitcoins. Ethereum rewards miners based on its proof-of-work algorithm called Ethash, with 5 ether given for each block. Ethash is a memory hard hashing algorithm, which encourages decentralized mining by individuals, rather than the use of more centralized ASICs as with Bitcoin.
So which is better?
Although most people will tell you that one cryptocurrency is better than the other, both Ethereum and Bitcoin has its advantages. Most importantly, the deciding factor on this topic is your budget and your motive.
If you want to buy in to the most proven cryptocurrency with the most developer support, Bitcoin is the better of the two currencies. It’s the most expensive out there though and its transaction fees are high, so if you want a big return on what you’re putting into it, you’ll need to have plenty to spend and be patient. Bitcoin has repeatedly swung upwards and downwards in value in recent weeks, and its historic crashes can be devastating for those with big money invested. But as the die-hard fans often say, just “hold.”
If you plan to make more regular transactions, to pay for goods or services, or send cryptocurrency to a loved one, Ethereum is much more manageable. With less of a scaling problem, its blockchain is far more open and you’ll see your currency confirmed far faster. You’ll be charged much less for the privilege too. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than Bitcoin in that aspect.
This is still a young venture and the future of any and all of them is far from certain
