The case for Ethereum maximalism

ETH is interesting, but BTC has worked since almost 10 years.

The investment made in ASIC miners give a good reason to a lot of people to prefer BTC to ETH. They would certainly jump being BCH if BTC had some serious issues.

ETH certainly has a place, but it seems to be the #2 place because of the choice of algorithms.

First, Bitcoin has smart contracts. Not providing a Turing complete scripting language was an intentional choice to improve security and scalability.

Second, Bitcoin offers Ethereum compatible smart contracts in the form of a layer 2 solution — rootstock. What happens if you want to have a “world computer” with GPU support? That’s not something Ethereum can add without greatly impacting decentralization (for a coin which is already hugely centralized). With Bitcoin, you can define a new second layer network to add that functionality.

Third, he brings up Ethereum’s confirmation times as if changing a constant is beyond Bitcoin’s reach. Bitcoin chose their parameters (1mb blocks, 10min block times) to optimize decentralization. This is a feature. Ethereum doesn’t care for decentralization to the same degree. If Ethereum had the same level of decentraliation as Bitcoin did, they wouldn’t have been able to invoke their VIP function.

Second layer solutions are the technologies which have the full backing of the Bitcoin community. Sure, Ethereum could maybe add second layer solutions as well, but they aren’t fully embraced by the community. Ethereum wants everything and the kitchen sink to be on layer 1. With Bitcoin, layer 2 solutions are the solutions preferred and embraced by the community.

Ethereum is already imploding under its own weight. Syncing a full node, today, requires a very beefy PC with an SSD. Bitcoin can sync with a raspberry pi.