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Comment by dmihal | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, Ethereum is a better Store of Value than Bitcoin, not only because it is scarce, but because it provides utility, which creates demand.

People need ETH for:

* Paying transaction fees to use the network. For example, Visa is now settling payments with card issuers using USDC on Ethereum, so Visa needs to pay these fees with ETH.

* Collateral in financial applications: Over 11 million ETH (over $24 billion) have been locked as collateral in various financial protocols

* Staking & validating: In the same way that Bitcoin miners must purchase mining hardware to earn money, Eth2 validators must purchase ETH to earn staking rewards

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Utility? The transaction fees are around $30 USD now.

Fees are a function of supply & demand.

High fees means there's tons of demand to use the chain.

Yes, it sucks for small users who are priced-out, but scaling solutions such as rollups should be launching within the next few weeks.

It isn't small users who are priced out so much as almost every use case other than speculation.

Anything that does not allow more transaction throughput doesn't help.

Presumably someone receives more than $30 in value from these transactions, otherwise they wouldn't be willing to pay them.

No one is contradicting a basic tautology like that.

What do you think people are using those transactions for? The average transaction value is of $5,000 USD.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-eth.ht...

Do you think people are making these transactions for anything other than speculation? You said value, I said utility.

Imo ETH is not a better store of value than bitcoin today because of hashpower supremacy and therefore security btc enjoys. Even when ethereum goes full on PoS, it will still be dependant on bitcoin.

No.

The greatest motivation for Crypto success are hatred and fear.

BTC is succeeding because people hate/fear Central Banks printing money , so people love BTC and hate Central Banks.

Ethereum doesn't put itself up against the printing of money but against companies instead. Google, Apple, Spotify etc. People don't hate those companies and to the extent that they do....they manifest their hate by asking Government to tax them more, not migrating to a super hard to use and super costly decentralized platform to undercut their power. The consumer doesn't think in those terms.

People hate Robinhood after they blocked users from trading. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap are impossible to shut down.

If you think the point of decentralized systems are to ONLY replicate Google / Apple / Spotify services but in a decentralized manner, then you're mistaken.

When the internet came along, it wasn't to only replicate the Post-office or to just make mails faster. The internet enabled a lot of things you couldn't even predict at that time (or perhaps some could, if they truly understood the tech).

There are lots of things that the blockchain enables that you just cannot do in the traditional world even today. Couple of examples:

- You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/

- (Borrowed from another user in this thread) Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJUhnXQ76s

There's clearly going to be a lot more use-cases in the future. Finance is only the first field which is getting explored at the moment.

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