Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbobeirne | Hacker News Reader

What defines a currency being "better" than another? Is it number of transactions? Is it acceptance among merchants? Is it low fees? Is it stability in purchasing power? Is it likelihood that there will be a fatal flaw in the system that causes financial loss?

Every project has its own strengths and weaknesses, but it's hard to argue that Bitcoin isn't the best on many of those measures. It's all about which of them you as an individual value most.

View on HN

All the features mentioned above. For example:

- transaction times

- energy consumption

- scalability (BTC currently does 7tx/s)

- security (BTC is getting more centralized over time, increasing the risk of a majority takeover.)

- fewer fees as possible (ideally 0)

BTC only has first mover advantage, and security...for now.

I'm a big fan of bitcoin and a few altcoins, including some PoS. But I feel like you are understating bitcoin's security. It has been very well tested and has a large bounty - both in its market cap and value of transactions that have not been susceptible to any double-spend attacks.

Other coins might sound good on paper -- adding new features but introducing serious design errors that have yet to be discovered because they're not a big enough target.

You're right. But security today does not guarantee security tomorrow in a landscape where mining incentivizes economies of scale. The more mining power converges (as it is already doing), the more likely for a fewer entities to collude. While it may not be in their interest given their investment in the project, who says that a government or malicious actor might not?

another is privacy. Bitcoin is not private.

Monero is exclusively private and ZCash is opt-in private.

Metcalfe's law is also an interesting way for measuring value of the network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

Look at Bitcoin.orgs own marketing. https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#what-are-the-advantages-of-bitcoi...

"Payment Freedom" and "Choose your own fees" are both things that no longer apply to Bitcoin.

"Choose your own fees" still holds, but everybody has freedom around the choice of fees. You are free to propose a fee that suits you and miners are free to ignore your proposal.

The marketing makes it sounds like higher fees get processed/"confirmed" faster.

The reality is that if your fee isn't high enough, it stays in the mempool until it expires, never being sent.

For many online commenters the quality of a crypto currency is directly correlated to their portfolio

> but it's hard to argue that Bitcoin isn't the best on many of those measures

Seems pretty easy to me. What is Bitcoin best at apart from having the largest market cap?

* Longest running network.

* Largest network by nodes.

* Largest network hashrate / Most energy consumed.

* Simple Satoshi Codebase.

* Most accessible - blockchain delivered via satellite!

* One can run a node on a RPi. Requires 351G storage for full chain. Eth is TB's (and growing), requires SSD, fast CPU, etc.

You are not running ETH nodes at home.

* Most decentralized

* Most reliable

Half of them are debatable and the rest is true but useless.

You gain nothing from using a system that's 12 year old over one that's 6 years old. Also more nodes just dont add any usefulness anymore at some point, it just more not better.

Reliable is useless without comparing it to something else. BTC had unintentional forks and many small possible double spends and all that stuff in the last 12 years. Its overall reliable, sure but at what metric. Incidents per time? incidents per Tx? Or just the fact that it didn't die in the last 12 years?

I am running ETH nodes at home, on RPis. They are even participating in the (future) consensus model through PoS.

I'm a fan of Bitcoin, and I'm not sure why the random need to criticize Ethereum here. Bitcoin has enough reasons to be useful, no need to be insecure about other projects being useful too.

I was under the impression that the RPi CPU is too slow to process/sync blocks. And unless you have an SSD to store blocks, IO will limit your capacity to verify new incoming blocks every 15 seconds. This was my experience a few years ago.

Are your running a full archival ETH node on a RPI with a 3TB+ SSD attached?

I am also running a couple of validators at home without special hardware.

* THE HARDEST TO CHANGE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com