Vitalik Buterin once said Ethereum is a smartphone and a necessary improvement to Bitcoin, which he thought was a calculator. As a smartphone, Ethereum can “install” a calculator while also serving so much more as a versatile global machine.
The talk now is how Ethereum, given the implementation of EIP-1559, is superior to Bitcoin in all aspects. It is an interesting discussion in which four Australian University researchers took upon themselves to prove whether Ethereum proponents’ statements are correct.
Their in-depth study found that the upgrade drastically reduced ETH’s emission rate. According to findings, with over 1 million ETH destroyed since implementation, Ethereum now has an annual inflation rate of 0.98 percent, slower than Bitcoin’s 1.99 percent. While the latter is touted as hard money due to its low, fixed cap, Ethereum is proving to be upcoming “ultra-sound” money.
Therefore, factoring in how the EIP-1559 is shredding coins and taking a big chunk out of circulation, the odds of Ethereum being an institutional store-of-value as global inflation rates soar to worrying levels in highly likely. Already, in October, inflation rocked to over six percent in the U.S. even though the FED chair said it was transient.
Even still, Bitcoin hard-liners like Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy are adamant that BTC comes on top of other altcoins. They cite the chain’s superior hash rate translating to security and the stability of its codebase. The last major change was in the November 2017 “civil war” leading to the creation of Bitcoin Cash and the activation of SegWit. The most upgrade was in early November with Taproot.
