Which is better to buy, BTC or ETH, at the moment?
Joel IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT investors are interested in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was first traded back in 2009. Back then, you could buy one of the new digital tokens for less than $0.01. Prices steadily rose until peaking above $20,000 per coin in late 2017. Ethereum debuted in 2015 at $2.83, and in under three years was worth over $1,400.
By comparison, General Electric Co. (ticker: GE) shares first hit $2.83 in 1995, adjusting for dividends and stock splits. Today, a quarter-century later, it goes for about $12.
Although they're the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, similarities more or less end there. Bitcoin and Ethereum are totally different animals, developed for different reasons and with different internal dynamics.
Bitcoin
The de facto cryptocurrency leader, no other coin even comes close to Bitcoin, or BTC. At the time this article was written, the dollar value of all outstanding Bitcoin was $150 billion. The total market capitalization for all cryptocurrencies is $230 billion, and the second-most valuable digital currency was Ethereum, with a market value of less than $18 billion.
Here are some key things investors should know about BTC in the Bitcoin versus Ethereum investment debate:
The reward for bitcoin miners will be cut in half in mid-2020. Miners verify transactions on the Bitcoin network and are rewarded for doing so with a set reward for every block of verifications. The reward is how new bitcoins are put into the system, and that rate automatically halves every 210,000 transactions.
The reward is falling from 12.5 BTC per block to 6.25 BTC, and this will slow the expansion of supply. There’s a maximum of 21 million bitcoins that can ever exist; nearly 18.2 million are already in circulation.
Ethereum
Before asking yourself “Should I buy bitcoin or ethereum?” you should understand the different motivations behind the Bitcoin and Ethereum platforms.
Ethereum: a different goal than Bitcoin.
The two leading cryptocurrencies have “very different use cases, with Bitcoin acting as a store of value and Ethereum acting as a new decentralized computing network for application development,” says Zac Prince, founder, and CEO of Blocking, a crypto lender and wealth management company backed by investors like Peter Thiel and the Winklevoss Twins.