Bitcoin Forum

The recent fallout in altcoin prices, particularly ethereum, has boosted bitcoin’s dominance of the crypto market, now commanding nearly 60% of market share.

As of today, bitcoin holds 56.72% of the market compared to ethereum’s 12.62%, according to CoinMarketCap.

Bitcoin’s price woes of the past month have not been enough to compromise its market dominance, largely because ethereum’s struggles have been disproportionately fiercer.

None of the other altcoins have been a factor in the historic bitcoin/ethereum rivalry for crypto market dominance, a rivalry that has consistently favored bitcoin.

https://248qms3nhmvl15d4ne1i4pxl-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Historical-dominance.png

The orange line presents bitcoin’s crypto market share while the dark blue line shows Ethereum’s. Source: coinmarketcap.com

Continue reading >> https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-dominance-eyes-60-as-ethereum-price-flounders/

This is really a bloody bath for almost all altcoins, while BTC is still keeps its position above 6000$ some other coins experiencing a perhaps the worst days of their existence. In case of ETH situation looks pretty bad, only in last 30 days it is fall from 320$ to only 170$ and it keeps going down. It is therefore not surprising that BTC dominance going up and it is close to 60% ( currently 57.9% ), and it is just showing that people trust is most in BTC.

However, although the situation may seem dramatic for some observers and holders, for some others this is great opportunity to invest, assuming they believe in recovery of crypto market in future.

Remember how in the last year Ethereum fans were anticipating "the Flippening" - a scenario when ETH marketcap surpasses Bitcoin marketcap. For a few days a lot of people seriously believed in this possibility, but now, a bit more than 1 year after, crypto community seriously discusses how Ethereum is going to die soon. Everyone should take this as a lesson of how a common sentiment is never a good indicator of the future and how volatile and experimental the world of cryptocurrencies is.

Ethereum's drastic fall recently is quite surprising to me as ETH actually seems to be one of the coins with at least something behind it with smart contracts etc. Does anyone know if there's any accepted reasons why it's fallen so much? Haven't really seen any bad news that could have caused it so I'm quite baffled by this drop.


Wasn't that Bitcoin Cash? Regardless and like I said above, I thought that if any coin would gain any ground on bitcoin or come to rival it would be eth. I still don't think eth is over and far from dead and it'll probably bounce back at some point though.

Ethereum has nothing other than speculation to back it.

ICO's are what made its price explode in 2017, and ICO's are causing its price to implode right now. As for the smart contracts, it's just a bunch of utter nonsense. If you look at the distrubution of use on the Ethereum platform, then it's 95% fraud and speculation, and 5% actual use. 5% actual use in no shape or form is enough to have Ether be worth even $100 per token.

In the end, projects operating on top of Ethereum can't pay their bills in Ether. They need cold hard fiat in order to operate. Ethereum is going down quite fast, but it's nothing to be surprised about. I think it will bounce back up to a certain degree eventually, but it will be very hard to gain back its previous dominance with other platforms being around, which at the same time are 100-1000x more scalable. Sorry Ether, you failed. Vitalik doesn't even care.

I don't think this is true at all. You can't discount smart contracts as that is where its value lies. Surely you could just as easily say speculation is all bitcoin has as well. You might as well say take away bitcoin's mechanism as payment system and what do you have left? Well bitcoin being a payment system is pretty much its bread and butter much like smart contracts is to eth.

Crypto currencies are such things where you never know what is going to be next. I had very big expectations in Etherum and I still have, but now I'm full of doubts. Couple months ago I've got a Eth payment per some promotion job on social media and that time Etherum costed around 600$ so I decided to keep it in Eth with expectation that the price will go higher. This days I'm often thinking that I should to sell those  4 Eth immediately or to buy bitcoin, cause of Eth fuel almost three times lower during a short period of time, but Btc didn't loose too much if to see in percentage.

Perhaps you need to open your eyes. Did you ever attempt to use Ethereum?

And take away Bitcoin's payment system? Why would anyone discard an aspect of Bitcoin that's actually being used?

Bitcoin is the reserve currency of the whole crypto industry. It's actually being used as means of exchange. It's being used as store of value. Bitcoin is the sole reason altcoins have an indication of value at all. If Bitcoin wasn't used as benchmark, Ethereum and all other coins would be valued at least 75% below their latest exchange rate.

Yes, Bcash people were also talking about their own flippening, and probably still talk now, but they are just being delusional, because Bcash price was nowhere near close to that, while ETH had 30.63% dominance against Bitcoin's 37.82%.

You're right, ETH is not going to die anytime soon, unless maybe it's competitors will roll out some new tech that is objectively better, which I doubt. Maybe Ethereum can even be useful without decent scalability for some smart contracts that don't require frequent transactions. It's too early to call doom/moon now, because in terms of software so many things can change in a couple of years.

Those anticipation was still fresh on my memory where ETH fans do really have that confidence about that flippening but that thing didnt happen but somehow it do really give out some close percentage gaps
when it comes to dominance.If im not wrong these are the possible nearest point between btc and eth:

http://i67.tinypic.com/m9sggi.png

The price dominance of Bitcoin is giving a wide gap between it and other cryptocurrencies that even if they are all falling down in the market it is pretty tempting to exchange your BTC to the likes of Ethereum or even XRP. The price margin being bigger is ideal for people who have not shifted their money to Fiat and is still currently holding a falling asset like BTC because you will still get more cryptocurrencies in return as the price dominance of BTC is bigger compared to other cryptocurrencies such as ETH which is falling down at a much faster rate.

Yes. What is the problem with it and what exactly should I open my eyes to?


Because you said all Eth was nothing but a speculative tool, which is incorrect. The exact same is more true of bitcoin, but eth has the added value of things like smart contracts. Bitcoin just has the brand name and fanatics and hypebois behind it hoping that one day it will actually recover to become profitable for them.  


Any other currency could become the 'reserve' currency. Bitcoin is currently only more popular because it was the first. The big issue with bitcoin is that a lot of its value is based on speculative hype which relies on new blood to prop it up but once they panic and drop out the bubble quickly bursts.


So is practically every other coin including eth.


Bitcoin is currently a terrible store of value. It lost over $10k within months. That's not something to boast about.


That's pure speculation, but if bitcoin tanked to zero there would be another coin that would replace it. Bitcoin offers nothing else that any other coin can't and is one of the reasons why bitcoin is very risky to me. There's no good reason why bitcoin can't lose market dominance very quickly and be usurped by a new or even existing coin, especially if it has more benefits than just a speculative asset.

Some projects will finally die. It is quite probable that the small projects that have collected some ETH in their ICO no longer have sufficient balance to continue investing heavy in marketing and deceiving some users spreading false news in social networks.

We had too many projects, too many tokens. That did not serve for anything.

For all the semantics:

Ethereum - Flippening
XRP - Rippening.

---

I was not surprised by the dramatic fall though, back around April or May I think, I see Ethereum continued to free fall because of ICO project dumping to recover their cost and those bounty hunters doesn't really care about their token so they all dump simultaneously and for me the scenario will likely to continue. And now that they are getting smart, they dump, then shift to Bitcoin, just look at the dominance of Bitcoin now close to what 60%? ETH has the fundamentals, but as this point it will continue to suffer because of the dumps (ICO's and bounty hunters) and I suspect that EOS has something to do with the current price slump as well.

This year saw the creation of many shitcoins that are worthless, all to increase Market Cap "more Circulating Supply" and speculation.
What is happening now is the same fate of many countries that are printing more and more currencies to solve their problems.

Ether is being circumscribed, but there are a lot of ICOs that need to end where we see a fresh market.
I do not know why everyone focuses on "Bitcoin Dominance," in my view, the correct number is 99%.

@Sutters Mill,

You are desperately trying to discredit Bitcoin and praise other altcoins as if they are anything special. Perhaps you're on the wrong part of the forum man.

Bitcoin a horrible store of value?

Values as per the 10th of September 2017;

Bitcoin $4083
Ethereum $281
XRP $0.20
BCash $515

Values as per today;

Bitcoin $6250
Ethereum $170
XRP $0.25
BCash $420

It's not Bitcoin's fault that people buy in at peak levels. Blame people for that.

I'm not going to waste another second on you.

Bitcoin has one job - being Bitcoin. That involves being hard to stop, hard to control, impossible to corrupt and letting anyone who fancies join in. To fulfill that all it has to do is be sendable and receivable in a timely manner.

ETH is trying to do too much and it can't cope enough to do any of it well. It's not foolproof, it's not immutable and its contracts often have not been secure. By an objective measure it's failed to do its job so far.

It might pull it back and improve. I think the more likely outcome is that the Fisher Price of smart contract projects will come along and ejaculate up its arse until it drowns in its successor's sperm from the inside out. That's if anyone figures out what smart contracts are truly for.

Its prime problem has been ICOs. I wonder where it would be if they hadn't come along. Smaller but stronger most likely.

If we go by the charts, the very first ICO activity pumped Ethereum to an all time high of $50 back in 2017 and we all know what happened after that. It was one hack of a run but unsustainable for obvious reasons.

People we're calling Arthur Hayes an idiot for calling Ethereum a double digit shitcoin, but suddenly everything starts to make sense for the same people with how it keeps tanking.

Must be part of it with how they raised more than 7 million ETH tokens. It's crazy to think that you grant your worst enemy, because that's what EOS is, so much control of circulating supply and voting power.

It may very well be that through proxy EOS will troll vote ETH development. They already decided to lower block rewards to 2ETH instead of 3ETH, which is a daring move if the price doesn't increase beyond previous levels.

It is not just Ethereum. Most altcoins have lost a significant chunk of their value, down more than 80-90% from their peaks. I guess we will see some altcoins drop to zero shortly. The era of raising millions with nothing but a white paper are well and truly over. Yes

sentiment is a great indicator, but good traders usually bet against the crowd, not with it.

i never bought the "flippening" hype. i knew that both ETH and BTC were forming a blow-off top (not that i or anyone was able to call the top accurately). it was plain as day for anyone whose ridden bitcoin and altcoin bubbles before.

but by the same token, sentiment works in both directions. like you say, "the crypto community seriously discusses how Ethereum is going to die soon." sentiment has completely flipped. remember what happens every time people say "bitcoin is dead" and be wary of getting too bearish on altcoins after they've already fallen 85-95%. when the altcoin haters are celebrating in the streets, we're usually close to the bottom.

No, I'm really not at all. You're desperately trying to paint all alts as bad whilst ignoring the facts and you'll even be dishonest to do this. I'm actually just being realistic and stating truths but you're obviously blinded by your own fanboyism of bitcoin and dislike of alts.


What you have done is called cherry picking. I can do that also:

Bitcoin value December 17th 2017: $19,783
Bitcoin value today: $6200

Bitcoin value July 28th 2018: $8151
Bitcoin value today: $6200

That's not a store of value.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value


Bitcoin is a speculative asset. Something that loses such drastic value in the space of hours is not a good store of wealth as much as you and anyone else wants it to be.


You're right, it's not bitcoin's fault it's a terrible store of value, but it is. You can blame people for that all you want, but I'd love to hear how you can work out how to buy in at peak levels or not. You can't, especially when it can lose hundreds within the matter of hours and that is why it's not a good store of value and is a speculative asset.



I completely agree.


I don't think bitcoin or any crypto is perfect, but my main quarrel with 1referee is him saying that eth has no other value other than being a speculative asset. If that's true then the same applies to bitcoin (except it doesn't have smart contracts so speculation would all it also would be worth for). Take away the speculators from bitcoin and the value would be worth a lot less than it is now and arguable near to collapse.

If you put the two coins up against each other it would be easier to say Bitcoin is more 'perfect' than ETH. It just works for anyone in a way ETH doesn't and can't, partly because of the extra functionality. Even the developers themselves say it's not designed to be a form of money.

I think in general far fewer people can wrap their heads around what ETH represents, or care, and does so it does attract more speculators, and more clueless ones. That's pretty moot though as everything is given life by speculators.

The thing with Ethereum is that Vitalik and other lead developers are forcing economical activity on that platform to be settled in Ether, which is pretty much what governments do when they force you to use a specific fiat currency.

There has been more than enough demand for a change to have everything running on top of Ethereum pay for gas in their native currency instead of Ether, which is perfectly sensible, but fiercely blocked by the aforementioned entities. I somewhat get it, because less demand for Ether means more available supply, but the whole point is decentralization and freedom, and yet it isn't allowed to bloom in that specific way.

Bitcoin obviously has a better design. It's elegant, functional and scalable. It is obviously more established and has much more users than Ethereum. But that's not the point, and it doesn't matter what ETH developers say.

The fact is that both BTC and ETH derive their valuation from speculation about future adoption. Real world usage of ETH is completely nil, and real world usage of BTC is maybe a hair above that. Total network transactions are so low, they are almost nonexistent compared to legacy financial infrastructure. The entire economy is built on centralized fiat gateways and payment processors. The arms race among miners is completely speculative. The community's general consensus that a) BTC will be adopted by the masses and b) that this will bring 6-8 figure dollar valuations is completely speculative. None of the assumptions about future adoption can be extrapolated from the past. Nobody has any real idea how to value BTC because it's not based on hard numbers. It's based on speculation that other people are going to join the network and drive the price up.

I think Sutters Mill makes a legitimate point. Trying to argue that BTC has lots of value outside of speculation (quantified how?) is a poor argument against ETH. They're both speculative assets. There are lots of reasons one can trash ETH based on its poor design choices.


I'm not sure I follow. ETH is the native currency on the platform. Why would gas fees be tied to currencies other than ETH?

In Bitcoin, we would never price transaction fees in anything other than BTC at the protocol level. Anything else would be absurd. I don't see the Core developers as "forcing" that on me.

You don't get it.

By default applications and smart contracts running on top of Ethereum are forced to pay fees in Ether instead of their own (could be tokens tied to specific dapps or smart contracts) native currency. It's completely unnecessary and forces everyone to fund their channels with Ether in order to even use it. If you don't have Ether, you are pretty much excluded from network participation.

It's perfectly possible to have dapps and smart contracts run while paying for fees in their own token rather than using Ether. There are various ways to tackle that obstacle, but it's held back by the lead developers for a reason.

Sort of like, if you don't have BTC, you're excluded from Bitcoin network participation? :D

Interacting with contracts running on Ethereum requires mainchain transactions, with fees paid to ETH miners. Why would transaction fees be paid for by anything besides ETH? That was the whole design, and I think it's the only economically feasible solution if transactions are taking mainchain block space. If people want to pay fees in non-native tokens, they'll need sidechains.


Could you point out a few of those ways? Because I don't understand how this would work, economically.

The most convenient option is to have non Ether token fees be pushed to the miners directly at protocol level. It will require a fork, and some level of re-organizing, but it's perfectly possible, and there actually seems to be quite some demand for this.

The second option is where an intermediary exchanger on the Ethereum network basically does the converting from x token to Ether and miners still get their Ethers, but that doesn't address the main issue with how you are still tied to Ether. It however does allow anything operating on Ethereum to operate without touching the underlying Ether token. In other words, more operational freedom.

The third option could be a mixture of both aforementioned options. Let miners pick what fee they think is the most economically attractive fee for them.

What's the goal of this change? It won't fix the biggest current problem of Ethereum - scalability, fees will still be high because blocks will be full, regardless in what form they are paid. I think it will be a good change because users won't have to keep track of how much Ether they have if they only want to use some tokens, but I don't see any benefits beyond that.

The goal is exactly in your post; it solves the dependence on the underlying native asset.

And yes, Ethereum itself is still a mess in terms of scalability and that indeed won't change any time soon. I have never been a fan of these platforms because you are heavily subjecting yourself to a force that decides for you when to scale and what to use. The main reason projects run on top of Ethereum is because of how easy it is to market yourself and thus raise capital.

If nothing happens in terms of scalability within a reasonable time frame, you'll see that more and more projects will disconnect themselves from Ethereum to run their own platform.

it just started for ETH, the troubles I mean
they have announced the block reward cut to 2 eth per block instead of 3
also there are ASICS to mine ETH hitting the market very soon (unless they are just waporware,but it is highly unlikely since its Bitmain's child and they do not copulate around)
so flippening was just fappening and can soon be real rippening for Vitalik's creation

The first option seems totally unfeasible economically. Why would ETH miners want to receive less ETH fees as block rewards, to be replaced by random tokens they don't want? Fees exist to prevent tragedy of the commons -- to keep mainchain contracts from monopolizing precious block space without paying for it. Cryptocurrency miners are investing in what they mine. ETH miners are mining ETH because they want ETH. The whole incentive system break downs if you pay miners based on what users want rather than what miners want.

The second option seems utterly centralized. In theory, it could be done with contracts, but at best they would be dependent on third party APIs (to price and sell tokens) that could be exploited. It also seems problematic from a data propagation standpoint. Wouldn't this result in a huge and permanent influx of additional throughput on the network due to all these conversion transactions? That seems really inefficient.

It always seemed like a basic premise to me that to use a cryptocurrency network, you need to own some native tokens. ???

I would choose bitcoin over ethereum any day of the week, and btc is better as a currency for numerous reasons (though obviously not perfect), but eth has different functions (mainly smart contracts as I said), but I also think a lot of people do - or did - just get involved with it because they saw it as the second best thing to bitcoin and missed out on getting in early with btc so they're trying their luck with eth in the hopes that someday it will bring them riches. I just had issue with the argument that eth's only use is as a speculative asset when I don't think that's true, and especially when I think it's speculation that is driving the majority of the entire cyrpto market right now, but that doesn't mean to say you can't be both a speculator and purveyor of the tech either as many people are.


 :D

Do not sell your ethereum. Crypto currency is really hard to predict. However, the situation can still change very drastically. Ethereum can still rise well compared to bitcoin, especially as ethereum is now quite cheap. Keep your ethereum, there is no reason for it to fall in price. All this is temporary.