BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes says that Ethereum () can’t compete with Bitcoin () as digital gold as the top smart contract platform was never designed to be a bare form of money.
In a new interview with Laura Shin on the Unchained podcast, Hayes that Ethereum is solving a different problem than Bitcoin.
“I think Ethereum is trying to solve a different problem. It’s not trying to be money. And I think the core developers, or whatever the political will of Ethereum [is], displayed this very clearly to us in 2016 when they bailed out everybody after The DAO by doing a hard fork.”
Hayes says that Ethereum’s hard fork of 2017 that resulted in the creation of Ethereum Classic () lends to his point about ETH’s purpose.
The crypto veteran says that Ethereum Classic’s relatively low number of users compared to regular Ethereum is evidence that the majority of the ecosystem is interested in something else besides the sound money that ETC shoots for.
“ETC, if you want to say, is the real Ethereum money, [but] no one uses it. That should tell you all you need to know about whether or not Ethereum wants to be money, and it might not be the inflation rate that is the thing that shows everyone that Ethereum is not money.
There may be some other compromise that they have to make because the goal of ‘we want to be this decentralized computer for everybody in the world’ conflicts with immutable money. I don’t know what that is, but I think we have a one-on-one sample set of what they did when they were confronted with that sort of choice.
They made the choice on the side of ‘let’s be the power of the decentralized computer.’ I believe they continue to have that vision, and so that’s why I don’t believe Ethereum is digital gold or the money of the cryptoverse.”
