In a blog post titled "Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency" Fred Ehrsam the CEO and co-founder of coinbase outlined his believes why Bitcoin might lose the #1 spot as the most valuable cryptocurency.
We have sat here for the last 3 years seeing only infrastructure apps like wallets and exchanges emerge on top of Bitcoin. Why is that?
My theory has been that the scripting language in Bitcoin — the piece of every Bitcoin transaction that lets you run a little software program along with it — is too restrictive.
Enter Ethereum. Ethereum has taken what was a four function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full fledged computer. We now stand only 9 months out from the beginning of the Ethereum network and the level of app development is already faster than Bitcoin’s. We are finally getting rapid iteration at the app layer. In one early example, people have designed a decentralized organization (The DAO) — a company whose heart is code and peripheral operations are run by humans, rather than the other way around — that has raised $150m so far in the largest crowdfunding ever.To be clear, I don’t think this needs to be a contest between Bitcoin vs. Ethereum and Coinbase plans to strongly support both. I think this is about advancing digital currency as much as we can. There is a significant amount of overlap between the two, however, so the comparison is valuable and the potential for competition is real.
Further down the post you can see Fred in detail explaining why he believes why Ethereum has the potential to become more valuable than Bitcoin.
What is very real, though, is the possibility that Ethereum blows past Bitcoin entirely. There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can’t. While Ethereum is less battle tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare. First mover advantage is challenging to overcome, but at current pace, it’s conceivable.
#ethereum #bitcoin #coinbase #cryptocurrency