WhalePanda, one of the most prominent Bitcoin (BTC) proponents, explained the seeming enmity with the Ethereum (ETH) community. The criticisms point to multiple failures of ETH to become what it promised, while switching between use cases almost every year.
https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1208687188063531008
The ETH community has given up on the narrative of “flippening” or replacing BTC a long time ago. But the network is also uncertain about its potential use cases. In 2019, ETH broke away finally from the ICO space, which fizzled out after regulators turned hawkish on most projects.
On the side of the Ethereum community, all the successful projects were showing the network saw significant usage. But WhalePanda’s criticism also reveals Ethereum is a tool to perform scams, and proliferate risky finance innovation.
DeFi has been a trend that locked in reported billions in value in 2019. And while it helped boost ETH prices, it is also a potential source of failures, loss of trust, and subsequent panic. DeFi is also a tool to give ETH market prices a source of growth, as owners may leave the positions gradually, by locking ETH in crypto-lending projects.
The current leadership of Ethereum in the dApp space and in producing tokens and smart contracts is also under attack.
In 2020, it is possible Ethereum will lose some of those positions, Bitcoin maximalists often claim. Networks allowing smart contracts and dApps continue to evolve, and if Ethereum fails to adapt, it may lose its projects.
One of the big problems was the large size of the distributed network. All ETH transactions are kept only on so-called archival nodes, and most nodes running currently carry only partial information about transactions. Ethereum’s developers also recently disturbed the community, as they planned another minor hard fork, to once again delay the difficulty increase.
Despite its growth in 2019, ETH remains risky. The coin currently trades at $129.61, below its level at the start of the year. ETH peaked just below $300 in the summer months, entering a long slide to its current positions.
