Big Bitcoin vs. Ethereum topic

[Phu Juck]

I’m not a coder but I know for good coins, technical characteristics are very important and want to share a good piece of education.
When we review Bitcoin vs. Ethereum, it is a very complex topic, where many arguments need to be evaluated.
Let’s make a list here about Bitcoin vs. Ethereum topic.


Important: Do your research which devs are building a coin

When we exchange your valuable Bitcoin or Ethereum for a different alt coin, we really need to research which devs are behind it.
It is very important because devs are making a project successful, or if it’s a bad dev, can make it fail.

A good dev should have huge knowledge in crypto, coding and computer science because he needs to achieve a secure and fast blockchain. If he does not make a good code, such platform can be hacked and coins will be lost and lose value because of price dump.


Ethereum offers more fast and cheap transactions

When compared between Bitcoin and Ethereum, in general Ethereum’s transactions are faster and cheaper. It is a very important point when evaluating a coin.
But Ethereum’s network has much baggage like NFT’s and it can happen for Ethereum to be more expensive at times, compared to Bitcoin.
So, Ethereum transactions are not necessarily cheaper.


Bitcoin has SegWit to lower transaction fees

SegWit offers us compared to Legacy or nested SegWit really low transaction fees and it will reduce our costs paid for transaction fees a lot.
SegWit transactions are simply smaller in size compared to legacy transactions because all witness data (signatures) is separated from transaction data. As a result, we get a lower fee per transaction vbyte.


Bitcoin’s SegWit offers increased Block Capacity

Bitcoin has a limit of transactions in terms of transaction size for each Block: a limited number of transactions can only be fitted into each Bitcoin block, limiting Bitcoin’s capacity in terms of  transaction size per new block. 
SegWit allows more transactions to be fitted into each block. By separating all witness data, SegWit effectively decreases size limits for each transaction and effectively increases Bitcoin’s block size limit, which helps to process more transactions per block. 
So, SegWit actively helps to reduce congestion in Bitcoin’s mempool.

Overall, using SegWit addresses will help us to reduce transaction costs, have a better network performance and future-proofing for additional improvements and features for Bitcoin.


Reasons for and against Pos vs. PoW

Quite contrary to PoS, PoW is very hard or almost impossible to compromise. Not so for PoS, where more attack vectors can be found.

For example, PoS can be abused by rich stakers. Many PoS projects have a so-called pre-mining of coins allocated to the team and the team can abuse such pre-mined coins to gain influence about project decisions.
A large pre-mine is making a project centralized in many ways and devs can gain much influence by staking a large amount of PoS coins.
PoW is not having such issues.

A similar problem is called "nothing at stake", where attackers benefit from no cost to stake ETH or similar PoS coins. Should a fork occur, no matter if the fork is a friendly, accidental or a malicious attempt to rewrite history and reverse transactions, it’s a given strategy for any staker to stake on every chain. By doing so, he will get a reward no matter which fork will succeed and he will have no additional cost to do so.
In PoW, such a problem is not happening because PoW always means work (spending electricity) needs to be done. A cost occurs for every miner and he can’t mine on multiple chains because mining of a different chain means an extra cost.


Bitcoin is well reviewed

When Bitcoin was invented, it was set up to be a big security. Hacks should be impossible and get prevented by good code. Bitcoin attracted and still has a very large community of really educated developers.
Bitcoin has a very reliable coder community, where flaws will be detected early before implementation and no risks are being taken. Many much smaller coins have a very flawed code review process.
A large and educated coder community reviewing code during testing times is an important advantage for Bitcoin.

And luckily, it saves us from possible hacks, when hackers are prevented from detecting flaws faster because all flaws are removed before implementation.
We have seen so many hacks, where a flawed code was exploited and people lost money, like for Altcoin cross chain bridges recently or when Terra Luna failed.
Still, people are buying coins from unreliable coders like Tron from Justin Sun or even weaker DeFi coins like Acala Stablecoin from Polkadot’s supplier Web 3.
Unfortunately, some people will only learn after a loss.

Some coins are very centralized and have a single point of failure like Solana, when it was down several times or devs have much power like in Binance Coin or Tron.
And DeFi coins can easily print some more coins / tokens into existence.
Bitcoin is having a big advantage here.



Bitcoin has PoW

It is big controversy for a long time, if a coin makes PoW or PoS, like it was for Ethereum [ETH]. Not for Bitcoin because Bitcoin developers have decided PoW is best because of security. From what Experts have said so far, PoW is very hard or almost impossible to compromise instead of PoS, where more attack vectors can be found. Like Corona, we should trust majority of experts who have education and experience in an issue. Satoshi implemented PoW not PoS because Satoshi knew. He was very experienced and called it right.
PoS can be abused by rich stakers and makes a project centralized in many ways like premined coins and devs can create much influence by staking a large amount of PoS coins. PoW is not having such issues.


Security is Bitcoin’s priority

As for a safe cryptocurrency, security standards are very important. First point, we need security standards and Satoshi implemented it right himself, when he developed Bitcoin. Early Bitcoin developers added more security standards. Second point is after some time, to NOT remove such security standards. First point and especially second point are relevant to many Altcoins, which is a big issue for Altcoins.
Many Altcoins don’t offer anymore to create private and public keys to prove ownership of funds and access it. It is very concerning and seems mind blowing to many experienced coders.
For example, when creating a Solana wallet or similar new Altcoins. Altcoin developers are not focusing on security.
Or even MEW is bitching around more and more every time going away by implementing insecure patches. We need to have our private key offline.
Many Altcoins are leaving people vulnerable which is very concerning.
Bitcoin is better like Electrum for example. Its design is not so nice but Electrum is good tech and recommended by many experts.

Bitcoin is still having very high security standards today because of Bitcoin does not want to build a hype coin, Bitcoin wants to build a safe coin.
It is our duty to select a safe coin instead of an unsafe hype coin.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

Let’s make a list here about Bitcoin vs. Ethereum topic.

It is unnecessary to compare Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Chronologically, with what already happened, if Bitcoin was not created, Ethereum was not created too. Vitalik Buterin was enlightened by Bitcoin so that he believed in decentralization and built Ethereum. Years later, he moved from decentralization with Proof of Work to centralization with Proof of Stake. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer with Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum even with Proof of Work, was still centralized with majority of ETH in hands of Vitalik.

Security is Bitcoin’s priority

Bitcoin network is stronger and more secure than altcoin blockchains.
https://howmanyconfs.com/

If you want to see Ethereum, use Wayback machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200522061503/https://howmanyconfs.com/

With that wayback machine time point, you have information for comparison: 6 confirmations of Bitcoin blockchain equal to 1h 7min but with Ethereum blockchain, to gain similar security, you will need 887 confirmations that equivalent to 3h 16mins.

Do you see big difference?

[coolcoinz]

ETH is something completely different from bitcoin. It's a platform on which other projects are built and it's more of a work in progress kind of project that changes as it goes. A great example of these changes is going from PoW to PoS.

Bitcoin is more of a store of value type of asset, a digital gold, the first cryptocurrency, a commodity.

ETH has a lot of weak links for instance its founders being alive and open for attacks from government agencies. A live leader can be sued, blackmailed, arrested, even assassinated if needed. He's only human who if forced to dump his stash will do it. People go insane all the time. There's no assurance that Vitalik won't end up in a mental facility in a few years.
If I were to choose one of these I'd always choose bitcoin.

[red4slash]

Although some consider this a big topic but in the end this remains the same as the previous discussion where there is nothing to argue about because after all bitcoin is much bigger and better so we cannot assume that this will be a competition because even Ethereum itself eventually follows bitcoin both in terms of price and their journey.

There is no avoiding that ETH is still very good for altcoins right now but that doesn't mean bitcoin and ETH can be compared because in the end the conditions remain the same where bitcoin remains the first in terms of choice and after that only ETH and other altcoins.
I think for this discussion in the end it will continue like that where we will remain and choose bitcoin if faced with 2 choices even though ETH is not a bad thing but in the end bitcoin remains the best.

[pooya87]

When we exchange your valuable Bitcoin or Ethereum for a different alt coin,

Ethereum itself is an altcoin itself and using bitcoin and ethereum in the same context doesn't make much sense! One is decentralized, secure and does what it was supposed to do and the other is centralized, mutable, buggy and doesn't do what it was promised to do.

Ethereum offers more fast and cheap transactions

No it doesn't.
Actually under same circumstance (same level of usage) ethereum transactions are far more expensive than bitcoin's. We saw that during the 2017 ether pump due to the ICO craze where it became nearly impossible to use due to high fees.
Ethereum also has slower transactions because as it was pointed out 1 confirmation on the mutable ethereum blockchain is not the same as 1 confirmation on immutable bitcoin blockchain.

When compared between Bitcoin and Ethereum, in general Ethereum’s transactions are faster and cheaper. It is a very important point when evaluating a coin.

It is more important to first understand what "fast" means.
Fast transaction doesn't mean when they get included in a block, it means when they become irreversible.
One confirmation on Bitcoin blockchain is usually equal to dozens up to in certain cases thousands of confirmation on other chains, and that's assuming they too have immutable blockchains. For an altcoin with a mutable blockchain where they have a history of rolling back blocks, no number of confirmation can be considered truly safe anymore.

it can happen for Ethereum to be more expensive at times, compared to Bitcoin.

No, that's impossible simply because Ethereum is useless (it's only used for hyped up short lived ICO garbage and its family) and also most importantly ether has an unlimited supply so like fiat it will continue losing value in long run not gain value.

SegWit transactions are simply smaller in size compared to legacy transactions because all witness data (signatures) is separated from transaction data.

SegWit transactions have a smaller weight not size.
The witness data is also NOT separated from the transaction data. It is still part and parcel of the transaction.

a limited number of transactions can only be fitted into each Bitcoin block,

All blockchain based cryptocurrencies have a block size cap so they can only include a finite number of transactions in each block.

By separating all witness data, SegWit effectively decreases size limits for each transaction and effectively increases Bitcoin’s block size limit,

As I said witness is not separated. The block and transaction structure is changed so that transactions can contain more data and blocks to contain more transactions in a backward compatible way.

A large pre-mine is making a project centralized

And ethereum has a massive premine ...

Still, people are buying coins from unreliable coders like Tron from Justin Sun or even weaker DeFi coins like Acala Stablecoin from Polkadot’s supplier Web 3.
Unfortunately, some people will only learn after a loss.

Well, such people aren't actually buying "coins", they are making bets on random stuff trying to make some money gambling. They might as well be in a race track betting on running horses or something like that!

It is big controversy for a long time, if a coin makes PoW or PoS, like it was for Ethereum [ETH]. Not for Bitcoin because Bitcoin developers have decided PoW is best because of security.

It's not exactly a controversy, it is a topic that has generated a lot of FUD.
And the choice of PoW is not because it is "best", but because there is no alternative. For example PoS is just fundamentally flawed so it is not even worth considering since it was proven at least a decade ago that it is not a viable algorithm.

[Dunamisx]

Ethereum offers more fast and cheap transactions

I don't think you're right with this, bitcoin transaction is cheap and you cant compare it to that of the other network mentioned, maybe you get the wrong idea or make mistake about the intention you meant from this statement, bitcoin transaction is fast, cheap and reliable, so on the aspect of the cheaper transaction fee rate, bitcoin is cheaper than ethereum network, know this in case you dont.

[seoincorporation]

As op mentioned in the post, there is a risk on Pos, but for that there must be big holder with a huge part of the coins, the risk is the same that a 51% attack on the bitcoin blockchain, if some one is holding more than 50% of the coins then he can try that attack, but I don't considera this risk on ETH because no one is holding that big amount of coins.

[B1-66ER]

Real big transformative ideas in computer science are very rare. A solution for the double-spending problem in distributed databases was published in 2008. Since the beginning of the commercial internet in the early ’90s, that was one of the pitfalls to be overcome in the goal of creating a pure digital asset. Satoshi solved that problem in such an elegant way. All other design decisions made by Satoshi were also elegant, such as creating absolute scarcity by setting a finite supply of Bitcoin, choosing EC secp256k1, etc. Regarding creating distributed applications, honestly, I would use the Java Virtual Machine.