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May 2, 2021

An excellent thread of reasons from

@balajis

. I particularly like his crossover point that people thought Facebook would subsume Twitter, looking naively at feature set.

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Balaji Srinivasan

@balajis

· May 2, 2021

Replying to @andy_matuschak

Most of @elidourado’s arguments for ETH are good. But it just serves a different purpose than BTC. Ethereum is programmable finance. Bitcoin is digital gold. Even EIP-1559 won’t change that because it signals that Ethereum *has* a mutable monetary policy.

May 2, 2021

BTW I’ve been mildly shocked that this thread has mostly avoided eliciting obnoxious behavior in my mentions. I have updated more charitably towards crypto Twitter! Thanks, people-with-laser-eyes!

Replying to

Important to specify “superseded” on what dimension. If “as a store of value” $BTC is superior due to its simplicity (slow, hard, digital gold), fixed supply (miners would never vote to raise), and ideological purity (long history of failed BIPs).

Thanks! The latter two make a lot of sense to me. Can you say more about why the simplicity properties would create value independent of the others? (Eg imagine if ETH already existed and someone proposed a much simpler alternative; what would determine its market cap?)

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This is probably the best answer I’ve gotten so far.

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Replying to

think the argument is that you need this sort of one stable (moves slow without breaking things, i.e., usually no hard forks), deflationary token (like gold) and the other which can incorporate changes (hard forks) faster and has stable inflation rate (akin to cash)

@lingmann

Replying to

Proof of Stake by design incentivizes centralized control of the protocol and supply, which is antithetical to open and decentralized money. Smart layering of protocols provides best of both worlds (stability and trust in base layer, higher layers for innovation and experiments).