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( votes)Bitcoin and Ether together command the lion’s share of the crypto market. Due to their massive market share, people often pit them against each other. However, they are both designed to perform different tasks and achieve different goals and even complement each other in many ways.
To understand the difference between the two, it is important to delve a bit deeper into the underlying technology for these digital currencies – the blockchain.
What is Blockchain Technology?
Bitcoin and Ethereum are both based on blockchain technology. This means that information is stored in blocks and connected through permanent chains. Each block contains information about a set of transactions within a specific period. As the time frame changes, the block changes, and a new one is added to the chain, each block reliant upon the preceding block. This is why it is called Blockchain.
Put simply, a blockchain is a large digital ledger. In blockchain technology, a network of independent computers scattered around the globe maintain a list of transactions, allowing them to be checked and validated.
Bitcoin Blockchain
The Bitcoin blockchain was created in 2008 as a P2P (peer-to-peer) electronic cash transaction system, which means all intermediaries were eliminated and there was no central governing body (as opposed to traditional currencies that are regulated by the respective nation’s central bank). This feature made the bitcoin blockchain a decentralised system and became the basis for the evolution of blockchain technology. Therefore, bitcoin is also called the first-generation blockchain.
Speed: Each block on the bitcoin blockchain is verified and created at an interval of 10 minutes.
Token supply: There is a strict cap of 21 million bitcoins that will ever be created. Miners are rewarded in BTC every time they mine 1 block. But the rewards given to bitcoin miners are halved after the addition of every 210,000 blocks to the blockchain, or roughly every four years. This reduces the rate at which new bitcoins are released into circulation by 50 percent. As fewer bitcoins are released into the system, the value of each bitcoin increases as it becomes scarcer.
Ethereum Blockchain
Launched in 2014, the Ethereum blockchain took it one step beyond just the documentation of transactions. It introduced a system of self-executing or ‘Smart Contracts.’ These smart contracts are self-managing in nature with actions triggered by conditions such as the passing of an expiration date, on reaching a particular price, etc.
These actions are executed by ‘decentralised apps’ (dApps) on the Ethereum network and each dApp performs a different function. Therefore, the Ethereum blockchain also needs its native currency for transactions – the ETH.
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