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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

I do think Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin eventually in usage. In some ways it already has. Ethereum's transaction fees are set to drop like a rock over the next few years, and so many useful things are built on it already.

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What usage? Isn't bitcoin used only for speculation, and a bit of crime on the side? I'm not aware of any usage for bitcoin that isn't purely commodity trading (with zero actual underlying value) or scams.

Ethereum has had a few other interesting, non-black-market uses over the years. DeFi, game assets, NFTs, etc. And the technology has actually evolved. Bitcoin is just...still bitcoin.

These are all bubble scams.

A significant % of Bitcoin hasn't moved in years, people seem to be using it as a store of value. Crime usage is magnitude smaller than traditional currencies (source Citi's Bitcoin on the tipping point report).

The same Citi report that confused percentages with basis points in reporting that 13% of credit card charges are fraudulent?

https://www.ft.com/content/8553aba7-8beb-4b48-9287-be6a08065...

Bitcoin is used daily for paying real people money across the internet. You are in fact speculating on it's uses.

I know someone who just took out a loan on Ethereum to buy a house.

That's its usage.

https://defipulse.com/

Every one of those "apps" is usage on Ethereum, everything from trading (Uniswap, think of it as a Coinbase competitor), loans (Maker), to mutual fund like assets (Yearn).

It's hard to convey in a few words how much better buying a house using Maker/Eth was compared to going to a bank. Everything about the process smashes the traditional system.

Doesn't Ethereum have the same environmental issues?

Ethereum is supposedly changing over to proof of stake, but it's been a years long process

Right now it has >$5 billion staked and >100,000 validators on the PoS network. What remains is to transition the rest of the network and eliminate miners, which is a relatively simple process.

>eliminate miners Yes please. Ive been trying for weeks to buy a gpu.

Love that username! XD

Yes, Ethereum has been working towards several long-tail projects for years. I think it's more important to distinguish that nothing good or important has come of Ethereum though, and that it is NOT money, and it is not a safe currency. The blockchain is fraught with front-ran txs, the mining is very centralized, and all projects atop ETH suffer dependency on it's success. The blockchain is growing very large which leads to further centralization on very expensive customized equipment. DeFi is a buzzword that means little but "super alpha experimental money leveraging tools" and financial instruments on the cutting edge. Ethereum is Dave & Busters tokens in comparison to Bitcoin being real money.

> more important to distinguish that nothing good or important has come of Ethereum though

I mean, Ethereum has the second largest marketcap of all cryptocurrencies and it feels like 80% of the research & development either comes from Ethereum directly or close-by ecosystems.

To say that Ethereum is Dave & Busters tokens when compared to Bitcoin is funny, since every single cryptocurrency is magic internet money anyway.

Not once Proof of Stake is adopted next year (hopefully).

Yes. Ethereum 2.0 "promises" to fix most of them though. We'll see.

They're moving toward PoS, which should help with that: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

They are talking about POS in ethereum since years.

And now the PoS chain has already launched and been working great. Next step is just to move the PoW chain to it. But they are definitely going slowly and safely. And it is definitely a slow process. :(

Yeah, duh, it's not like it's a small project:

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540...

It's pretty bad that Bitcoin still hasn't started working on it.

Their mainnet PoS network went live last december. The aim is to turn off PoW next year.

The recent activation of the beacon chain (and ether staking on it) means that they're committed to proof of stake now. All currently staked ether would be stranded otherwise.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/docking/

The v2 POS is live, but the complete migration of the v1 chain will take one or two years: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

Come on - you’d say the same thing about the freeway that plowed through some wonderful neighborhoods and blights us with noise and pollution. It’s all good. Cars are going electric, Ethereum is going to become efficient - problem solved. /s

Ethereum is already transitioning to proof-of-stake which has a number of benefits including much lower power usage. I'm so tired of people equating bitcoin with all cryptocurrencies.

Worse as it is specifically designed to run on GPUs.

They would like to switch to proof of stake and plan to do so next year.

ETH wasn't designed to be a store of value, there is no max supply and the emission rate is higher than even Vitalik predicted/expected... storing your money in ETH is generally a bad idea.

They are changing the transaction fee pricing system though to a model that 'burns' (dumps to /dev/null) part of the transaction fee when there is congestion. Exactly how much will be burned is hotly debated, but it will put a damper on the inflation side from block/staking rewards.

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