Researchers Call Ethereum Better Than Bitcoin, Here's Why

Ethereum is said to be better than Bitcoin (Digital Market News)

JAKARTA – The dominance of Bitcoin (BTC) as the number one cryptocurrency has the potential to be shaken by the number two crypto based on its market capitalization, Ethereum (ETH). Recently researchers from Australia cast doubt on BTC's reputation as a top-notch hedge. ETH is considered to have the potential to overtake BTC.

The research was conducted by four researchers, namely Ester Félez-Viñas from the University of Technology Sydney, Sean Foley from Macquarie University, Jonathan Karlsen from the University of Western Australia, and Jiri Svec from the University of Sydney. They reveal that Ethereum has the potential to become the “world's first deflationary currency.”

Launching Cointelegraph, on November 18, researchers published a paper on how the EIP-1559 upgrade makes ETH a potentially better store of value. The increase was launched last August to burn transaction fees or gas fees. It is recorded that more than one million Ethereum has been burned out of the total circulating supply of 118,583,580 ETH.

In addition, the report also says transaction fees of more than 50% of the 12,000 newly minted ETH per day are burned thanks to EIP-1559. They believe the demand for Ethereum is increasing due to its strong ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi), more ETH will be burned.

“Increasing the Ethereum creation rate since EIP-1559, the expected increase in the total Ethereum supply is only 0.98%, less than half of the almost certain 1.99% increase in Bitcoin supply over the same period.”

The paper explains that Ethereum can be a hedge against inflation compared to Bitcoin. The researchers conclude Ether provides “better inflation hedging properties than Bitcoin, and therefore Ether can offer superior long-term storage of value than Bitcoin.”

In October the inflation rate in the US increased to 6.2 percent. Inflationary pressures are driving investors to invest in cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. Given the limited supply of Bitcoin of only 21 million coins, it is likely that Ethereum will be considered by long-term investors as a hedge.

Ethereum advocates have started calling ETH “very good money” in response to Bitcoiners touting BTC as “hard money” or “healthy money.”

On the other hand, Cointelegraph rates Bitcoin proponents like MicroStrategy head Michael Saylor as liking Bitcoin because they see it as much safer in terms of hash rate and more reliable given its immutable supply and rarely changing protocol. Ethereum has undergone constant evolution and has seen publishing changes. Saylor explained why he believes Bitcoin is the best choice at the Tucker Carlson event on December 1.

“Bitcoin is the highest form of property that mankind has ever created,” Saylor said.

Microstrategy purchased an additional $414 million worth of Bitcoins on November 29. At the time of writing Bitcoin is trading at IDR 816,041, while Ethereum is at IDR 65,722,960. BTC is down 2.9 percent, while ETH is up 1.9 percent in the past week as data from Coinecko reports.