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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin has gotten the biggest free ride ever from Ethereum. 2 bull cycles now have been driven by increasing usage on Ethereum (icos in 2017, and now DeFi and NFTs), while Bitcoin absorbs most of the dumb money who hears about “blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin” in the news.

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Bitcoin is the reason we have Ethereum in the first place, so I'm not sure if your statement is fair. ICOs were a pump-and-dump fad. DeFi is proving to be useful and there are already DeFi projects coming up on Bitcoin (rsk, sovryn) and the jury is still out on NFTs.

That’s kinda what we heard about Lightning and payments, but we can currently see that there’s more BTC on Ethereum, than there is BTC on Lightning according to http://btconethereum.com.

I doubt there’ll be any significant value locked in RSK/Sovyrn, when most of the liquidity is on Ethereum. Plus, it’ll take time for BTC developers to learn Solidity, and most of the DeFi network effect will be on Ethereum and other EVM compatible chains.

I agree with you on the network effects of eth having most developer mindshare, but one thing to keep in mind about lightning is that a lot of end-user channels are private, so if you're just counting the number of channels or liquidity locked up on lightning as growth, you won't see the full-picture.

Check out STX - Stacks on bitcoin as well

The Bitcoin smart contract landscape is impoverished. Rsk is a custodial service which has somehow convinced people it is "on Bitcoin". When you use Rsk, your Bitcoins are held by these 11 companies: https://www.rsk.co/powpeg/ (their private keys are held in a special "tamper-proof" box).

Icos, DeFi, and NFT are just new ways to gamble. Bitcoin competes with gold as the best store of value. Most people aren't interested in gambling, but storing their wealth.

They are new ways to gamble, but not everyone is in it to gamble.

ICO is just a way for startups to raise money (though lately, it seems to be more about governance tokens once they have their project up), DeFi is a way for people to lend and get loans, trade margin, synthetic stocks, and NFTs empower creatives to make money off of their work and people buy them because they enjoy it and also see them as long term investments just like in the traditional art world.

Are the prices ridiculous? Sure, but so is Bitcoin during bull runs. Things will settle during the next bear run and tokens will likely reflect more realistic prices.

My point is that rises in the Bitcoin price seem to be driven by news about applications on Ethereum. That holds regardless of whether or not you think Bitcoin somehow isn't gambling.

It's the other way around. Bitcoin is rising because it's being accepted by treasuries and institutions as an investment, and it is also following the price appreciation cycle from the last halving event. Everything in crypto is following bitcoin. NFTs were invented a long time ago, but they're popular now because of the bull cycle.

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