CTO Tether Paulo Ardoino: Bitcoin Is Money, Ethereum Not

Ethereum is said to be unfit to be juxtaposed with Bitcoin because ETH is not designed as a medium of exchange. (Photo; Doc. Pixabay)

JAKARTA In the midst of the widespread news of Ethereum Merce, Paulo Ardoino as CTO Tether (USDT) issued a statement regarding the position of ETH. According to him, ETH cannot be compared to Bitcoin (BTC) which can be used as a medium of exchange even though the merger process is complete.

He also mentioned that Ethereum does not deserve to be juxtaposed with a solid Bitcoin narrative regarding its position as money. Ardoino believes Ethereum and Bitcoin have different goals priorities.

Ardoino conveyed this view to Crowfund Insider on Tuesday. According to him, Ethereum is stuck between claims as a form of money and claims as a platform.

Based on the description in its whitepaper, Ethereum is designed as an alternative protocol for building decentralized applications. Therefore, Ethereum has complex capabilities as a smart contract platform, non-Fungible Token (NFT) decentralized applications and so on. All transactions on the platform are supported by Ethereum.

However, a number of parties claim that Ethereum can apply as money, because of its toxic structure after The Merge. Coupled with the mechanism for burning transactions with substantial declines in ETH per block will effectively make it a pure deflation currency.

This could theoretically place him in competition with Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency known as a long-term inflation hedge due to its fixed supply. However, Ardoino has different opinions.

Ethereum is Not a Exchange Ethereum

ETH cannot compete with Bitcoin in front of money because there is no fixed supply, and it's not really a world computer yet because it has a shared global state and is therefore too slow to be scalable, said Ardoino, quoted by CryptoPotato.

The CTO added that Ethereum Merger won't fix Ethereum's relatively high transaction fees, something Ethereum developers have confirmed, nor will it make Ethereum more decentralized.

In addition, he also added that The Merger will not solve network bottlenecks, and therefore does not make Ethereum more useful as a monetary network.

The fact is that Bitcoin is the only asset out there that has a solid narrative, which hasn't changed yet, he said. Ethereum still doesn't match Bitcoin because the narrative keeps shifting, concluded Ardoino.

A similar statement was made by BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes who stated that Ethereum cannot act as money because it already functions as an Ethereum transaction token. In addition, Ethereum also has complex capabilities. This is different from Bitcoin which is only intended as a transaction tool.

"That's why this is a good form of money," Hayes said, because the value cannot be combined with the actual utility of other items.