[bhaak]

Don't look at Bitcoin. That hasn't changed much and not much interesting stuff (besides some drama) goes on there.

Look at the Ethereum space. That's where most of the action is these days. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the current hype. The ETH2 phase 0 is projected to go live later this year (this time for real :-). 60% of Tether is an ERC20 token now. etc.

Oh, and if you are interested in drama and have missed it, look up the Quadriga story. That story is so unbelievable whacky, no screen writer would have been able to come up with it.

[beaner]

IMO, "boring" is exactly what Bitcoin should be right now. It's becoming normal.

Ethereum does have a lot of really interesting things going on that are super cool. But I wouldn't take this to mean that Bitcoin isn't developing or that it has somehow become stodgy or less relevant.

Bitcoin's developments are more the field of payments, decentralization, and privacy. These parts are not flashy, but are absolutely fundamental for its usability as money and store-of-value in the future.

The biggest differentiation though is that Bitcoin has an explicit inflation rate while Ethereum actually has no specific monetary policy at all. It is up to the devs and its scarcity could be undermined.

They're both extremely interesting for different reasons, but for those of us who got into crypto through economic reasoning about the gold standard, scarcity, government control of the money supply, etc. - the things many have seen for a really long time as the problems at hand - Bitcoin is by far more directly addressing them.

It's "boringness" at the moment means these objectives and economic motivations are becoming more agreeable.

[tomputer]

> Don't look at Bitcoin. That hasn't changed much and not much interesting stuff (besides some drama) goes on there.

No. Look at Bitcoin first.

If Bitcoin fails altcoins will most certainly fail too. There is a reason why Bitcoin does not change that much, it has to be safe and trusted for storing value. It is not a "move fast and break things" project.

> Look at the Ethereum space. That's where most of the action is these days. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the current hype.

Bitcoin is DeFi (Decentralized Finance), if anything.

[bhaak]

OP already looked at Bitcoin but as that is moving slowly, I pointed them in another direction where more stuff is happening.

"Finance" is much more than just payments or store of value. Bitcoin is way behind Ethereum in that regard.

Of course, that doesn't matter if you don't think that decentralized finance makes sense to have.

[maps7]

What is ETH2 and why should I care about it?

[nostrademons]

Ethereum + proof of stake + sharding. Right now every node on the Ethereum network validates every transaction using a similar proof of work system as Bitcoin. This creates a transaction bottleneck; I believe Bitcoin can do something like 7 TPS, Ethereum about 11, which is woefully inadequate for a global financial system (for comparison, I believe Visa does something like 20,000).

Proof-of-stake replaces this massive electricity waste with game theory. Every validator must put up a deposit (in ETH) to participate. If it cheats, it loses that deposit. The damage it can do to the network is limited to less than the deposit. Therefore, it's never profitable to cheat - and so they won't, or if they do, they will go bankrupt, remove themselves from the network, and self-limit the problem. And transaction validation can now be split among thousands of nodes (instead of having those thousands of nodes all validate the same PoW), which means the network can scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

[maps7]

Sounds like a better approach. Do you think Bitcoin (BTC) will go down this path too?

[nostrademons]

Bitcoin has a cultural bias to being conservative. Their selling point is that they were the first cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin network has never been hacked (even if individual exchanges or wallets have), and so they are a much more stable and dependable store of value. In the past they've been quite resistant to fundamental changes in how the blockchain works.

I'm pretty excited about Ethereum precisely because they're willing to experiment and rethink everything about their approach. I do suspect that soon after ETH2 is launched we will see a high-profile hack that steals everyone's ETH and requires a complete rollback of the network.