Ethereum Up, Bitcoin Down, Why?

Something extremely rare is occurring, something we have not seen for two years. Ethereum is rising, while bitcoin is either not moving or even falling.

This state of affairs used to be common place. The ping pong of crypto, which seemingly applies only on the way up – or everyone is miserable on the way down so no one bothers to care about it.

The crypto show we call it, a stage taken by different cryptos at any one time in a passing of the batoon manner.

The last time ethereum took the show was January 2018, when the entire infrastructure basically broke down. Network congestion, exchanges couldn’t keep up, google searches topped and topped, Coinmarketcap overtook even New York Times in pageviews.

Before that, bitcoin had reached $20,000 and before that ethereum had gone from about $50 to $420. Before which bitcoin had surpassed it’s previous all time high to reach $3,000. And before which ethereum had gone from nada to $20.

This time, as always, dogecoin opened the show after a hilarious joke on April 1st 2019. Since then, bitcoin has dominated, but perhaps no more for now:

Memory fails a remembrance of when eth was green in a sea of red, but is this just traders shuffling about, or is there something more?

We are tempted to go for the latter, but to data we are bound, and the data for now suggests this is just internal movements about:

A lot of ethereans went to bitcoin simply because they thought it might rise while eth might not move. So now it is probable some of them are thinking eth might rise, while bitcoin might not move.

That’s presumably because the eth 2.0 teams have shown themselves to be competent, without delays or shenanigans.

They’re “new” guys and some girls, so the complacency or familiarity has not quite yet set for them, with it for now being more of an exciting new venture and a race in some ways to attract node client users.

They also appear to not quite have torn allegiances, with the focus of the two main ones, Lighthouse and Nimbus, fully 100% on eth for now.

As time goes on, they too presumably will row, maybe, over a comma here or a dot there, but for now they’re happy bunnies, showing the customary introductory respects, and general good will.

One hopes this continues until sharding gets out. Presuming they do a decent job at it, they can bicker all they want afterwards.

This renewal, however, for now at least, gives sort of a new honeymoon to ethereum. We simply can not judge sharding as it stands until we see what it actually is. No one, therefore, can quite comment yet. The devs thus are back in their own comfort zone, left to do whatever they do, with all happy to let them do it since so far they have largely performed.

That makes it very tempting to say perhaps some restructuring during last winter maybe did lead to a “proper” trajectory, direction, and atmosphere.

Then there’s the fact that what last year may have seemed as promises to be delivered in centuries to come (in crypto time), now it might feel more like this is sort of here-ish now.

The Proof of Stake (PoS) that is, which is easy to dismiss or have it overshadowed by sharding, but the hybrid structure is very interesting and while full PoS is not without disadvantages, it does go some way towards returning that one CPU one vote although not quite perfectly.

As for sharding itself, it does still remain quite blurry. Yet the team\s appear to be competent and there are plenty of them that have a lot of stake in it working, both reputational and financial, so things have perhaps changed a bit.

While for bitcoin, which could compete and very easily, the anti-stake of a certain prominent “dev studio” has led to a situation where the great decentralized network finds itself effectively without developers.

There are bitcoin devs of course, but they appear to be Liquid devs first. They are coming up with quite a few interesting things, but for Liquid.

Eventually perhaps those things will make their way to bitcoin, but “eventually” is now narrowing to perhaps a time frame of just a year.

For ultimately, and logically, the network that transfers most value is the most valuable network. Which network that is exactly depends on how much capacity it can handle, as well as if it can fit within the simple test of: even some basement kid can fork it if he/she wants to. Meaning, no individual or group can change history in the absence of 80%-90% agreement.

As it stands now, where usage is concerned and that “properness” aspect, it does look like only eth and btc are playing.

Thus if one of them cracks scalability, then we have that broadband moment. We have a new service based race rather than protocol race.

Not that necessarily it will be winner takes all, but it may be at least in an 80/20 way.

Hence why bitcoin and eth tend to go back and forth in rising markets. We are simply not in a position to say who will crack that code, with both having excellent development teams, and with both – under the surface – working towards providing that sufficient capacity for value transfers.

So the race is back on. If you think you know who will win it, think more than once again, but also perhaps feel a bit privileged that you can even bet on one of these two horses at this still very early stage.

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