Is etherium a complementary process built on top of bitcoin?

[steppinup]

Is etherium a complementary process built on top of bitcoin?

I apologize in advance if this shows how little I understand digital currency. 

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[Emoclaw]

More-less. Ethereum (like many others) is an altcoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin.
It's based on Bitcoin, with quite a few key differences such as the Proof of Work algorithm and Smart Contracts.
I don't understand what you mean by complementary process, but they are both different digital cryptocurrencies with separate blockchains.

[mining1]

No, it is not. They are 2 different projects. To get an ideea about what ethereum is, try to compare the invention of the wheel ( bitcoin ) with quantum computers ( ethereum ).

[shyliar]

No, it is not. They are 2 different projects. To get an ideea about what ethereum is, try to compare the invention of the wheel ( bitcoin ) with quantum computers ( ethereum ).

If we want too use a silly analogy to explain the differences a better one might be comparing two cars. One is a basic model with very few bells and whistles; but, has the best safety rating of any vehicle on the road. The other comes with more options, it has intermittent wipers, a radio and air conditioning; but, it has the lowest safety rating on the road and has been involved in so many accidents it constantly needs to be rebuilt.

[JonBosco]

Ethereum and Bitcoin are essentially two different technologies (protocols) within the cryptocurrency asset class.

Beware, you'll run into a lot of evangelists who claim one is better than the other. This is for you to decide. Most of the people involved are emotionally invested for one reason or another.

Ethereum is more of a platform. It is its own eco-system. It has a very flexible and continuously evolving programing language. This is why you see the majority of software development working with it. Bitcoin has been stagnant for years. The key to technology is to follow the development. No devs, no progress. I don't code but many developers claim that the Bitcoin protocol can be very difficult to develop on. Again, take this with a grain of salt and test things on your own if interested.

Ether is the 'coin' that is complementary to the Ethereum platform.

Bitcoin is what inspired Ethereum. Without it, none of this exists.

I hold both but every year I find less and less of a reason to support Bitcoin itself. Definitely read more into both and find what interests you most.

[mynhpark]

Ethereum is a public blockchain platform for the execution of decentralized smart contracts; it features the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and it uses its currency called ether (comparable to Bitcoin) for peer-to-peer contracts. Ethereum’s smart contracts use blockchain stored applications for contract negotiation and facilitation. The benefit of these contracts is that the blockchain provides a decentralized way to verify and enforce them. The decentralized aspect makes it incredibly difficult for fraud or censorship. Ethereum’s smart contracts aim to provide greater security than traditional contracts and bring down the associated costs. Ether, as well as other crypto-assets, are held in the Ethereum Wallet, which allows you to create and use smart contracts. Ethereum also allows you to create digital tokens that can be used to represent virtual shares, assets, proof of membership and more. One great feature of Ethereum is that it gives developers a means to raise funds for various applications. For your new project, you can set up a contract and seek pledges from the community. The money that is raised will be held until the goal is reached or until an agreed upon date. The funds will be released back to the contributors if the goal is not met, or go on to the project if it is successful. Not only can Ethereum help you source funding, but it can also help to provide the organizational structure to get your idea off the ground. You can collect proposals from the people who backed your project and then hold votes on how you should proceed. This means that you can skip the expense of a traditional structure, such as hiring managers and doing paperwork. Ethereum also protects your project from outside influences, while its decentralized network means that you won’t face downtime.

There are also smaller aspects that differ between the two blockchain-based projects. Bitcoin’s average block time is about 10 minutes, while Ethereum’s aims to be 12 seconds. This quick time is enabled by Ethereum’s GHOST protocol. A faster block time means that confirmations are quicker. However, there are also more orphaned blocks. Another key difference between them is their monetary supply. More than two-thirds of all available bitcoin have already been mined, with the majority going to early miners. Ethereum raised its launch capital with a presale and only about half of its coins will have been mined by its fifth year of existence. The reward for mining Bitcoin halves about every four years and it is currently valued at 12.5 bitcoins. Ethereum rewards miners based on its proof-of-work algorithm called Ethash, with 5 ether given for each block. Ethash is a memory hard hashing algorithm, which encourages decentralized mining by individuals, rather than the use of more centralized ASICs as with Bitcoin. Bitcoin and Ethereum also cost their transactions in different ways. In Ethereum, it is called Gas, and the costing of transactions depends on their storage needs, complexity and bandwidth usage. In Bitcoin, the transactions are limited by the block size and they compete equally with each other. Ethereum features its own Turing complete internal code, which means that anything can be calculated with enough computing power and enough time. Bitcoin does not have this capability. While there are certainly advantages to the Turing-complete, its complexity also brings security complications, which contributed to the DAO attack in June 2016. Now, decentralized currencies like Bitcoin allow people to send money instantly to anyone in the world with a minuscule transfer fee. Bitcoin is increasingly being used for remittances, micropayments and online commerce with applications for distributed governance and finance in the pipeline. In this vein, Ethereum is a platform specifically designed to help people develop decentralized applications in the domains of remittances, micropayments and online commerce.

[benthach]

No, it is not. They are 2 different projects. To get an ideea about what ethereum is, try to compare the invention of the wheel ( bitcoin ) with quantum computers ( ethereum ).

If we want too use a silly analogy to explain the differences a better one might be comparing two cars. One is a basic model with very few bells and whistles; but, has the best safety rating of any vehicle on the road. The other comes with more options, it has intermittent wipers, a radio and air conditioning; but, it has the lowest safety rating on the road and has been involved in so many accidents it constantly needs to be rebuilt.

this is the best explain between bitcoin and etherium.
also the car with more options advertising they're the best, the safest, the stronger one but in reality nothing but false advertisement.

[Pursuer]

No, it is not. They are 2 different projects. To get an ideea about what ethereum is, try to compare the invention of the wheel ( bitcoin ) with quantum computers ( ethereum ).

If we want too use a silly analogy to explain the differences a better one might be comparing two cars. One is a basic model with very few bells and whistles; but, has the best safety rating of any vehicle on the road. The other comes with more options, it has intermittent wipers, a radio and air conditioning; but, it has the lowest safety rating on the road and has been involved in so many accidents it constantly needs to be rebuilt.

this is literary what happened here:

[dinofelis]

Is etherium a complementary process built on top of bitcoin?

No.  Ethereum is a totally independent crypto system.  Most alt coins are totally independent crypto systems, inspired by the first crypto currency, bitcoin, and re-using some of its principles, and sometimes, some of the code of the main implementation of the protocol.

But in fact, ethereum itself gives the possibility (contrary to bitcoin) to build other crypto systems on top of it.  Many "coins" you see listed in coinmarketcap, are in fact coins really built on top or even "inside" the ethereum system.  For instance, Augur is a system built on ethereum.

However, as others pointed out, the scope of application of ethereum being infinitely vast, it is also way, way more risky than "old generation" type crypto currencies, that just do token transactions, and ethereum's reputation has been seriously harmed by one of the spectacular first applications, the "DAO", that was hacked ; ethereum, instead of remaining agnostic to what happened to that application, essentially did something akin to "rewinding the block chain" to get people's investment out of the hacked DAO application, doing what no crypto system was thought to do.  In fact, the non-rewound ethereum still lives on, as "ethereum classic" (ETC) because part of the users were so baffled by the "rewinding the block chain" that they refused to do what the Satoshi of ethereum, Vitalik Butterin, told people to do.

(technically, it wasn't "rewinding the block chain" but "changing the rules how the block chain was working")

[zidorov]

Is etherium a complementary process built on top of bitcoin?

Definitely not. Ethereum is written from scratch but based on bitcoin main ideas.
Counterparty is an example of product build on top of the bitcoin.

[dinofelis]

Counterparty is an example of product build on top of the bitcoin.

Ah, yes, I forgot that even bitcoin had some stuff on top of it...

[mining1]

Actually, contrary to people's beliefs, the blockchain wasn't "rewinded" at all. No single transaction was reversed. The ETH that was stuck in the child dao never entered hacker's possesion, because of the 1 month lockdown put in place by the dao developers. With HF, basically the DAO was disbanded and investors were allow to transfer the ETH back to their accounts. But it didn't happen by reversing the transactions. Unless you count hacker's locked ETH in child dao that was going to enter his possession. It was a community effort/consensus to not allow the hacker get away with money.

ETC was born because of a scam attempt by chandler and sillbert, they dumped ETH at full price and since they also had ETC after the HF, they pumped it with ETH money  and tried to do an artificial "flippening" to double their money. Didn't work out. So it wasn't really a small part of community that didn't agree, since probably almost everyone in the ETC space that support it instead of ETH, never had any ETH to begin with.

About HF's, usually people think of hardforks as something bad because of the past experiences. I've read that some project a while ago was hacked and the devs had to fully reverse transactions by X amount of time. Nothing like this happened in ethereum and you probably know it. It's just FUD. Especially by those who bought ETC and fell for barry and chandler's scam attempt.


Nowadays, even those few projects build on top of bitcoin are moving away from it. See storj as an example http://blog.storj.io/post/158740607128/migration-from-counterparty-to-ethereum.

Bitcoin is too primitive and can't be more than a currency attempt.

[steppinup]

Thank you all for your generous clarifications, opinions and additional anecdotes. I pulled that question word for word from a popular MOOC      (which I'd rather not identify) and I will attempt to correct the mistake.  Thanks again.  This is the best forum for crypto!