Bitcoin vs Altcoins

"What about alt coins!!!". One of the biggest questions people ask when joining the cryptosphere. Let me start this by saying this; bitcoin is and always will be king, however that is not to say alts will not make you money. Alts come with risk, lots of risk actually, and that becomes quite evident when 90% of these coins fail months after their launches. I am going to dive into several key components between bitcoin and ETH (as ETH is the main alt coin).

-Network Specs (I will try to keep it as simple as possible)

Let's break down the bitcoin network first. Bitcoin's network is the strongest, most secure, most scalable, and most supported monetary network of anything on the planet. This is achieved through bitcoin's nodes, which are individual computers running bitcoin's program. Hundreds of thousands of bitcoin nodes are running throughout the world with no reliance on any one person or group (many are just individuals who wish to support the network). It is very easy and inexpensive to run a node for the average person. Investment firms, who are opening up bitcoin funds, are even running full nodes.

Now what about eth nodes? Well, this is actually one of eths biggest problems. In fact, a majority of eths nodes are run via Amazon web service(https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/LaunchNodes-Ethereum-20-Prysmatic-Beacon-Node/B08GKY4BST). This means ETH could effectively be shut down and destroyed if amazon so willed it (kinda like parler who used AWS). On top of this, ETH nodes are very very hard to run logistically, this is why there are very few people who run full archival nodes. They are very expensive to maintain, as many of them often break, or they simply cannot sync to the network. Most of the ETH network is often criticised for being overly complicated and unnecessary, which is why ETH nodes have such a hard time working. This is also why Vitalik, the creator of ETH, expedited most of this to Amazon. Otherwise he would have to rely on- well- 5,000 other nodes, and that ain't much, and there's a reason why there aren't that many running... The fact that ETH has almost no network support might warrant some skepticism.

This plays exactly into the overwhelmed network argument. Since most alts are built atop ETH (by the way the same thing is achievable via bitcoin) you can expect extra weight on the network. If ETH can barley run on its own then why would it be able to run soundly with thousands of other coins relying on it too. This is why Gas fees (network transaction fees) are constantly high and outrageously slow. ETH's website shows this exactly (https://etherscan.io/gastracker), and even has a gas tracker which shows all of the alts adding to this high fee and slow network. There are even people complaining about spending $30 in gas prices all while the transaction never went through. So in short- ETH cannot scale to what it claims it can for all of the listed reasons.

Bitcoin is money!

Why are you and thousands of others buying bitcoin right now? Why are large institutions putting bitcoin on their balance sheets? Fear of inflation, fiat failure, and macro economics scares are the main reasons whether you realize it or not. We know bitcoin is the archetypal model of hard, sound money, so what about ETH. Do not be confused between the twos in this regard, ETH is not money! In fact wtf even is ETH, "Vitalik doesn't even know because he markets it as so many things" (samson mow bitcoin developer)! He says its money, its a smart computer, programmable blockchain, etc (https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/). If ETH doesn't have a capped supply and nobody knows how much of it there is, then isn't it basically fiat? ETH sounds like the federal reserve, they don't know how many units are out there, nor do they know when the printing will stop! Which happens to be the exact reason you are buying bitcoin?! Unless you like fiat why would you buy it for the intention of it being money?

Decentralization VS Centralization

Since bitcoin has thousands of different miners and nodes running, you can be assured it is the most decentralized crypto around. Bitcoin has active developers, yet it is its own entity with no one in control or at least pulling the strings to a degree. Satoshi, the pseudonymous creator of BTC, sent bitcoin out to the world when there was no motive other than for people to test it out and contribute to its network. It had no group other than the many individuals behind it. Many people support bitcoin, but there is no board for it, nor is there a centralized group deciding what the next step is for the "project". Only individuals building on top of the network. Which differs from changing new parts of the whole network. Read below.

This is exactly true. ETH is a project. And that project is run by a centralized organization that funnels money to specific areas. Now take that how you wish this can go either way.

Finally, the only feasible way for bitcoin to be "centralized" is if all the world governments attack every node and bitcoin mining computer in the world (which is a lot of people and machine scattered all through the world). This would be a very hard task to complete. Yet, ETH has a majority of its nodes run by cloud services like Amazon web services, as mentioned previously. But, it gets worse, "just 38.4 percent (3,434) of those [nodes] were hosted fully independently (self-sovereign), and 61.6 percent (5,499) of the network was running in the cloud. Even worse, the top 10 cloud hosting providers amounted to 57.3 percent of all Ethereum nodes, with AWS hosting significantly more than any other provide". Now look at this chart.

So it may not be that decentralized, or as much as the ETH foundation board says they are. BTW who pays for that cloud service( I actually don't know this but I would assume the ETH foundation, just an assumption though)?

Moral of the story- ETH isn't like bitcoin. I think ETH is a cool thing sure, but its risky, it's not a store of value or money, it may not be that decentralized, and its network sucks. BUT... I'm not going to tell you not to buy it. ETH is a possible investment, it very well may make you money. There is some decent upside. But don't pretend it's as good as bitcoin, its not even close. It mimics almost non of bitcoins good attributes. It is a project! That's why there is a foundation launching ETH 2.0. It's far from perfect and has much work and many changes to be done for it to be considered. Buy ETH I don't care, have a relative amount to bitcoin, sure, but don't ever talk down on bitcoin and try and say its better. Because we all know that's a phat lie!

IF YOU WANT TO BUY ETH I DON'T DISCOURAGE THAT JUST KNOW THE FACTS AND WEIGH THE RISKS