IOHK CEO and former Ethereum co-founder, Charles Hosksinson recently pitched Ethereum against Bitcoin where it criticised the latter saying he would choose Ethereum over Bitcoin nine out of ten times.
“If I had to bet between just those two systems, I’d say nine times out of ten Ethereum is going to win the fight against Bitcoin.”
The Cardano founder who featured in a five-hour-long podcast session with computer scientist and AI researcher, Lex Fridman typically argued that proof-of-stake networks offer superior features in speed and functionality to a legacy network like Bitcoin. Hoskinson stated that
“The problem with Bitcoin is that it is so slow — it’s like the mainframe programming of the past. The only reason it’s still around is because there is so much invested in keeping it around.”
Charles shares a strong sentiment that Bitcoin with its consensus algorithm is stuck in the past and cannot favourably compete with rising proof-of-stake networks exclaiming that “you have to upgrade the damn thing!”
Hoskinson who praised the Ethereum community, thinks they are a sharp contrast to their counterpart in Bitcoin.
“What’s really cool is that Ethereum does not suffer that problem […] it’s getting to the point where it has the same network effect as Bitcoin, but the community has a completely different culture, they love evolving and upgrading,” Hoskinson argued. He opines that Bitcoin community is reluctant to change otherwise the “upgrade’ he talked about would be a serious consideration for the foremost and the largest cryptocurrency community.
Hoskinson’s view of Bitcoin as a slow network in terms of throughput is easily countered by strong Bitcoin proponents as the option of the lightning network allows micro-payments and bitcoin transactions to be done off-chain with minimal transaction fees and faster transaction times. With the recent heightened interest in the layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin the lightning network, Charles Hoskinson bashes it as “highly fragile” suggesting that any serious calling solution to the Bitcoin network has to be from the base layer.
“It is its own worst enemy. It has the network effects, it has the brand name, it has the regulatory approval. But, there’s no way to change the system, even correcting obvious downsides in that system” Hoskinson continued his criticism of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin network faced a huge backlash from one of its biggest supporters this year when Elon Musk and his company Tesla pulled the plug on BTC as a payment option from its platform. The tech billionaire went ahead to tweet on how centralised the bitcoin network is with just a few dominant players controlling a large portion of the network’s mining activities and by extension the hash powers.
Currently, bitcoin is trading around $32.8k and $618 billion market cap after rallying above $39k last week on the news that Tesla may resume accepting BTC as a payment option in the future. The cryptocurrency market took a nosedive in the weekend with a total market cap now at $1.37 trillion down by close to 50 percent from its all-time high in May at $2.6 trillion.