Original link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/08/3999.html
Author: Mu Mu / Source: Vernacular Blockchain
Author | Mu Mu
Produced | Vernacular Blockchain (ID: helloBTC)
Since the birth of Ethereum, people have been talking about “Ethereum surpassing Bitcoin” . As the ancestor of encryption and the king of encryption, Bitcoin has always had a variety of challengers. As a result, all of these challengers have failed, with the exception of Ethereum. With Ethereum’s POS merger, this potential Ethereum milestone could be a huge step closer.
Regarding the consensus mechanism of Ethereum to POS (Proof of Stake), there have always been different opinions. Today, we make a comprehensive comparison from the perspective of the relationship between Ethereum before and after POS and Bitcoin. What kind of threat…
01
POW Bitcoin VS POW Ethereum
It all starts with the origins of Ethereum and its origins with Bitcoin. According to a previous interview with Vitalik and his son by Fortune magazine and other materials, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, known as a “prodigy”, began to learn programming with little influence from his native family. Vitalik learned programming from his engineer father when he was a teenager. Learned about Bitcoin there.
With the in-depth understanding, Vitalik once contributed to the Bitcoin news website, and then co- founded a magazine about Bitcoin with Bitcoin enthusiasts, and analyzed his learning results and unique thinking through the output of the article, until Vitalik dropped out of school at the age of 19 , the Ethereum white paper was born.
At that time, this white paper was published in the Bitcoin community as a proposal to “design a new Bitcoin”, which attracted a lot of attention and, of course, met with a lot of skepticism. In general, the mainstream of the Bitcoin community obviously does not look down on the proposal of this hairy guy. Later, a brand new project called “Bitcoin 2.0”, Ethereum, set sail.
If you want to summarize the origin of Ethereum in one sentence, it can also be said to be a new direction proposed by Bitcoin’s “little brother”.
In the following 8 years, we have also seen the tortuous progress of Ethereum. Of course, although many people have been calling projects other than Bitcoin “copycats”, POW Ethereum still shows a different side:
A different route
From the perspective of value capture and application, Bitcoin has always been on the “digital gold” route . This consensus has already been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Needless to say. Ethereum is compared to “digital oil”. As a DApp platform, Ethereum’s Token ETH is used as a gas fee for smart contract calls to avoid resource abuse and attacks.
2. Ethereum in the eyes of the bit community
In the past, people always looked at Ethereum from the perspective of the Ethereum community. Today we look at this “little brother” from the perspective of the Bitcoin community:
1. Bitcoiners despise Ethereum’s unlimited additional issuance
The total amount cap and the maintenance of scarcity have always been the proud features of Bitcoin, while Ethereum has gone the opposite way and has not set a cap. This naturally leads to a lot of criticism, that no cap is “air” that cannot guarantee value.
Of course, the original intention of the unlimited total amount of Ethereum is to be used as a DApp smart contract public chain, considering that if the ecological volume is infinitely enlarged, and the Token inflation rate is too low, the gas fee will soar, and the cost of activities on the chain will change. become more and more expensive, which is not conducive to ecologically sustainable development.
2. Bitcoiners despise Ethereum for adopting a backward model
There was never any Bitcoin, there was just UTXO. I believe many people have heard this sentence. UTXO unspent transaction output (Unspent Transaction Output) is also one of the excellent solutions that Bitcoin is proud of, which greatly reduces the size of the database and can be maintained for a long time. Light and efficient handling. The traditional account model adopted by Ethereum is exactly the opposite. Whether valid or not, state data will continue to accumulate and become more and more bloated until a single node cannot process transactions. This problem is “state explosion”, which has not been solved by Ethereum so far. One of the potential “difficulties”.
To put it simply, the UTXO of Bitcoin is a person who does not get fat no matter what he eats, while the account model of Ethereum is a person who eats a pound of meat for a pound. If this problem is not solved, over time, Bitcoin will remain young and active, while Ethereum will become fatter and fatter to the point of being bedridden.
3. Bitcoiners despise Ethereum’s bells and whistles, “copycats” and “scams”
In fact, many B1C0iners have always believed that Ethereum is just like other “copycats”, and is worthless in the long run, and even thinks that it is a “complete scam”, such as some famous “Bitcoin maximalists”, the former CEO of Blockstream Official Adam Back listed multiple projects such as Ethereum, Ripple, etc. (mainly other projects with the market value of TOP10 other than Bitcoin) as scams.
Even the booming Ethereum ecosystem has not changed the views of these people. Recently, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor made remarks that “Ethereum is inherently immoral”, and also called ETH “obviously a security. “. ( Buterin and the ethereum community quickly fought back, also revealing that Michael Saylor was charged with securities fraud by the SEC as early as 2000 and had to pay a fine to settle with the regulator.)
As a protocol layer, the Bitcoin community has always advocated simplicity, simplicity is security, and Ethereum itself cannot be as simple as Bitcoin in terms of features and functions, and it is also one of the slots in the eyes of many Bitcoiners.
Under the proof-of-work mechanism, at the beginning, Ethereum, whether it is computing power or the number of nodes, is naturally not enough compared with Bitcoin.
02
POS Ethereum vs POW Bitcoin
Years have passed, BTC is still the same BTC, and ETH is constantly seeking to transform. As the Ethereum POS merger is approaching, what kind of new look will the POS version of Ethereum bring to us?
1. Energy consumption, a complete narrative change under the global “dual carbon” goal
Not long ago, Citibank released a research report specifically for the Ethereum POS merger upgrade, reporting that once Ethereum starts the upgrade, it may lead to a reduction in energy intensity, turning Ethereum into a deflationary asset, and possibly enabling more improvements through sharding. Scalable future roadmap. Overall, Citi noted that after the merger, Ethereum can be considered an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly cryptocurrency, as energy consumption will be reduced by 99.95%. Once Ethereum becomes a deflationary asset, its status as a store of value will become even more prominent.
In June 2021, the official website of the United Nations published a document titled “Is Cryptocurrency a Sustainable Solution or a Climate Catastrophe? , which raised the issue of high energy consumption brought about by Bitcoin, and pointed out that it is estimated that the Bitcoin network consumes more energy than countries such as Kazakhstan and the Netherlands. And, with fossil fuel power plants still making up a major part of the global energy mix, bitcoin mining is arguably part of the cause of greenhouse gas production and climate change. Compared to traditional credit card transactions, each bitcoin transaction consumes a huge amount of energy. For example, each Mastercard transaction uses only about 0.0006 kWh of energy, while each Bitcoin transaction consumes 980 kWh, which some market analysts say can power an average Canadian home for more than three weeks.
At the same time, the article on the official website of the United Nations also recognized the crypto industry’s search for low-energy solutions, and used the Ethereum-to-POS mechanism as a positive example . The article mentioned that the organization behind Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation, is researching a kind of A new way of verifying transactions, Proof-of-Stake consensus (PoS), which can reduce the cost of energy per transaction by 99.95%. At the same time, many blockchain industry players also want to ensure that the entire industry can eventually become completely carbon-free.
In general, top institutions have also noticed that the Ethereum-to-POS solution is not only in line with the alternatives to reduce energy consumption in the context of the global “dual carbon” goal, but also strengthens the status of Ethereum as a store of value. protrude.
2. Views that were despised by the Bitcoin community in the past have been eliminated one by one
In recent years, the Ethereum ecosystem has been attracting the attention of the Bitcoin community. We can observe that some members of the BCH and BSV communities, the two largest fork (fork) communities of the Bitcoin community, have begun to turn to Ethereum, indicating that this was once “scorned” The “little fanboys” of BTC are changing the perception of people (especially the Bitcoin community).
1. Reduce inflation or even deflation
There is still no issuance cap, but the dynamic Ethereum ecosystem plus EIP1559 and POS transfer has greatly reduced inflation and even deflation in some cases. This huge change makes many people think that Ethereum will also be in the future. It has become an important “value store”, which is the “iron rice bowl” of Bitcoin.
2. Solutions such as capacity expansion will appear one after another
With the successive launch of Layer 2 and future sharding solutions, and a solution to the problem of state explosion, the Ethereum ecosystem will provide a reliable infrastructure for large-scale Web3 and Metaverse. Although it is more complex than Bitcoin as a protocol layer, its ecological progress over the years is worthy of this complexity and has also proved its security and reliability. Through the development of Web3 applications such as DeFi, GameFi, and Metaverse, we can also see the landing value of Ethereum’s non-“Pond’s” sustainable applications.
03
summary
The former “little fanboy” has now begun to really show his muscles in front of Bitcoin. Regardless of whether it is a “copycat” or not, there should be less prejudice against new things and new solutions. Even though many projects have failed, their ultimate goal is to be better than the blue one. It is undeniable that the competitiveness of Ethereum is getting stronger and stronger. We will wait and see in the next decade!
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