As evidenced by the replies here, most people don't understand Ethereum, much less what is being done with Ethereum atm. Most people still don't know what DeFi means, or know that Ethereum has more nodes, processes more transactions per day, has thousands of more devs building with it, that real estate shares are issued on it (https://realt.co/), or that tokenized digital art is selling for millions on Ethereum (https://usaherald.com/beeple-an-iconic-digital-artist-sells-...). etc. Most don't know that $2.3B (0.62%) of BTC is locked in custody to be traded as an Ethereum token (https://defipulse.com/wbtc) as to get access to financial istruments built on Ethereum.

Eventually this will be common knowledge, but it isn't yet. It's early days.

>I'm surprised the rise in ETH has been so muted comparatively. Any conjectures?

ETH has been known to fork to change the blockchain and eradicate some transactions the leadership didn't like (see the DAO story).

That may be a good thing in some people's book. In the Bitcoin world, this kind of thing is not very popular.

Not an expert. But for me the most important factor is that Bitcoin’s supply is limited, whilst Eth’s is unlimited.

I can make three conjectures off the top of my head:

1. Bitcoin has some sort of "first mover" advantage which gives it a critical number of investors/PR that allows it to keep trading high, and no other coin will ever be able to catch up to it.

2. Bitcoin is actually technically superior to other coins, and it won't be supplanted until whatever the special sauce is, is replicated.

3. Something is hinky in the Bitcoin markets, eg, Tether, and this explains its divergence from other coins.

Simple guess is that the institutions that are getting into the space are going to be conservative and dip their toes in the better known coin first.

Ethereum software development has many perilous foot guns. Last time I looked, it's nearly impossible for a technical investor to validate the code in a contract themselves, because the compiled code from human readable languages produces hard-to-read machine code non-deterministically.

Bitcoin has enough dev power to implement any feature, the gatekeepers are the people running the node and to a smaller extent the developers and miners. There is a reason Bitcoin just is.

>'m surprised the rise in ETH has been so muted comparatively.

Well, there's the fact that Ethereum supply isn't finite.

As a matter of fact, from a practical point of view, it's pretty much anyone's guess what the issuance's rate is (there is an algorithm buried somewhere in the code, but whenever you ask an ETH acolyte how many more ETH there will be in existence in X months, I've never gotten a straight answer).

Bitcoin aspires to survive global crackdown, hence laser focus on decentralization, reliability, security, monetary soundness etc.

Ethereum aspires to have fun.

And OS/2 was better than Windows. Technical superiority doesn't matter.

And to be fair Ethereum has more scalability problems than Bitcoin.

Because is also much more technically complex than Bitcoin. Also none of them are solving real problems, but ETH has the capability to become that with DApps, once the current generation of politicians die and the next one, that is more technically capable will replace them. Going to be at least another decade before that happen though.

It’s too unstable and there was too much hype.

I believe they proposed the essentials of 2.0 years ago, and there were a lot of tutorials and workshops related to dapps that made it sound like a scalable, global compute network was just on the horizon.

Between that and the fork after the DAO got hacked, I’ve personally been staying away from it until 2.0 proves itself (phase 0 just came out this month).

I agree it’s very technically interesting, and think they’re responsible for the bulk of the innovation in the crypto space (them and monero for advances in privacy), but I don’t follow crypto super close/there might be others pushing the same ideas or better ideas in better ways.

ETH is still undergoing migrations, which will be completed in 2 years. I expect ETH to be muted for a while.

> has more capable leadership

Have you considered the possibility that this is a bug, not a feature?

Cardano is an even more interesting prospect to me.