Bitcoin Forum

Smart Contracts: Separating Ethereum from Bitcoin

One question that a substantial portion of people asked when Ethereum was launched was “Why to develop Ethereum when we already had Bitcoin for the transfer of payments?”

Well, Blockchain is a powerful technology and it is true that we haven’t fully utilized it to its potential. Bitcoin only makes use of one of the many possible applications of the Blockchain technology i.e. peer-to-peer transfer of funds.

Ethereum is a platform based on the Blockchain technology used for developing decentralized applications. It has a few benefits over Bitcoin such as the feature of coding Smart Contracts and the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/smart-contracts-separating-ethereum-from-bitcoin

I think smart contract is just a FAD, to me their is nothing special about it. What Bitcoin offers is freedom for all, people are losing focus of that

Ethereum started out as a technology that was focused on Smart contracts, but then Bitcoin started to stagnate with the SegWit vs BU battle and ETH

saw a gap and started marketing itself as a currency. They will grow as a currency, if people start using it as a alternative to a slow Bitcoin. We do not

know who is behind these spam attacks, but my suspicion is that a competitive Alt coin... might be behind this.  ???

"Freedom for all" is just a term we basically use for Bitcoin's decentralised blockchain and the ability to have the responsibility for your own funds by storing your online funds yourself.  Ethereum, even though its development team and systems are pretty centralised, does offer the same thing but with the addition of features like smart contracts.  I don't think that a "currency" which is actually mainly for features like app development can really develop as a currency since that's not even the main reason for it to exist.

Quite right. How many average person is going to use smart contract than Bitcoin itself? SC looks like too much hassle.

It seems this advantage of Ethereum or the thing that separates Bitcoin and Etheruem will come to an end.  There is an article that stated about Ethereum style smart contracts are coming to Bitcoin in June (https://bravenewcoin.com/news/ethereum-style-smart-contracts-are-coming-to-bitcoin-in-june/).  It seems the advantage of Ethereum to Bitcoin will be nullify with this project.  Here is another article about RSK (Rootstock)
http://www.coindesk.com/rootstocks-merge-mining-advances-bitcoin-smart-contracts-effort/

It looks the drama will never end. But as you can see the ethereum has more demands every time. Although some people were thinking if the suitable off-chain transaction that to be a substitution for the bitcoin itself is a litecoin.
More people have realized ether to be another one that ethereum make the competition is really strict.
But My guess if the actor behind of the spam attacks is who try to prevent the activation or who they have made a propaganda for the bitcoin itself.

I agree with you. Never forget, bitcoin and litecoin the real crypto coins!

First, we can already "program BTC", i can make an app that does all kinds of fancy things given a BTC payment or whatever. so the code isn't ran by a network of nodes, not a huge deal, for almost all Practical purposes...

Second, embedding program scripts within bitcoin TX themselfs, was part of the original design, but it was left out for security reasons, obviously satoshi wanted to validate the idea of peer-2-peer cash before he blew it wide open with p2p programmable cash. aaannnddd good thing he did, because transaction malleability .

Third, Bitcoin's script language will soon be blow wide-open. the time has come! segwit will fix transaction malleability and the next steps will be soft forking in newer and more capable script versions.

and FYI, almost everyone is onboard with most parts of segwit,  even BU and classic plan to do segwit to some extent, there is no debate around this issue. we all want to start exposing bitcoin scripting capabilities, this will come.

ether will forever be known as the experiment that taught us valuable lessons before we went to production.