«One of Bitcoin’s best things is how incredibly simple the protocol is.»
Buterin Vitalik – Founder of Ethereum
One of the main errors in which many fall by wetting their feet in the waters of cryptocurrencies is to belittle Bitcoin’s noble mission. They are amazed by «the possibilities of technology», and they do not fall, or take to account how important it is to separate the money from the state. Bitcoin seems too simple, so they covet more.
Not only does users happen to users. Also to developers. Vitalik Buterin is the biggest sample of this.
A little known anecdote in the cryptocurrency industry is that Ethereum was born by the resistance faced Vitalik when Bitcoin wanted to complex out of monetary use. It was the year 2012 and the then co -founder of Bitcoin Magazine ran into an idea of Yoni Assia, founder of Exchange Etoro.
The idea, baptized as Colored Coinsconsisted of «coloring» certain Bitcoin transactions, adding metadata that would allow them to represent assets such as actions, properties, art. It was like painting tickets for each one to represent something unique, but in the digital world. It was the first tokenization proposal in Bitcoin, something that has been proposed multiple times on other platforms.
The proposal found many obstacles, both technical and human. Bitcoin’s scripting language did not allow ease with all Vitalik’s dreams, and most community members at the moment were focused on Bitcoin being money, so it was not interested in introducing changes that complex the protocol.
It was for this reason that Buterin created Ethereum, with the promise of turning it into the world computer, capable of decentralizing all applications in the world and running all possible and composable programs.
However, today Ethereum, and most of the Altcoins really, are falling into irrelevance by a hard reality, which everyone comes to understand: The calls blockchains They are only useful in adversarial environments. When Coinprism closed, the longest colored coins platform, its CEO Flavien Charlon justified it in this way:
“In 99 % of the use cases we observe, Blockchain technology is, unfortunately, a little optimal option. It presents numerous disadvantages in terms of speed, scalability, costs and user experience. Unless the resistance to censorship is a fundamental requirement (which rarely occurs, especially in the field of the business blockchain, where all participants are known), adequate technological option.
Flavien Charlon – CEO of Coinprism
For many years, the blockchainer innovation scam has been bought. Each cycle arises a new designer that serves as fuel for insiders to win millions with tokens that will then dumpeate in the most naive. ICO, NFT, Play2eran, we are already bored to name them. Many times the potential utility of these innovations, as in the case of the DEFI, have been eclipsed by the amount of money that has been scammed. Interestingly, each of these narratives have emerged from Ethereum, and that promoted its price during several market cycles.
But in this cycle, no new narrative has won traction. The memecoins had an impulse that they lost relatively fast, but serve as an epitome of vacuum narratives, because they don’t even try to hide it: they are a flat mockery.
In this cycle, All eyes are perched on Bitcoin. Since the ETF Spot and Blackrock entered the game, all institutions want to buy Bitcoin. Since Trump announced that the United States would create a strategic reserve, everyone talks about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the narrative of this cycleand it seems that Vitalik also wants to capitalize this as a way to rescue Ethereum from indifference. After having fought to complex it, thirteen years later Vitalik promises that Ethereum «will be almost as simple as Bitcoin.»
Something that we have realized in our years in this industry is that the Altcoins, with their respective CEO, are really cryptocurrency companies, so it has a strategic sense that the CEO of Ethereum now seeks to align its company with the dominant narrative.
The problem is that this is impossible. And we do not say it due to technical or protocol difficulties. Nor will we enter Bitcoin’s neutrality, which is an issue that we have approached repeatedly. Although it is related to the latter, here we will emphasize The concept of predictability.
In an increasingly uncertain world, where artificial intelligences can make superrealist videos of the secret novels Between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping and would take time to affirm whether it is true or false, maintaining a respective share of doubt, Bitcoin is certainty. There is an army of notaries who distrust each other validating that each new transaction that is written in the accounting book is legitimate, and each block that adds up deepens the irrefutable truth.
In a world in which politicians emit trillion dollars at pleasure with the excuse of prefabricated crisis, Bitcoin has an army of comptrollers guaranteeing that the supply limit is respected, and that the emission schedule remains firm.
In a world in which cryptocurrency companies make modifications to Mansalva, they change their monetary policies through forced updates (hardforks) that force them to fulfill the will of the leaders if you want your money to continue having value, Bitcoin offers complete compatibility back and if you want to run the same software that corrected Satoshi in 2009.
No social artifact in the world offers the degree of predictability and certainty offered by Bitcoin. The fact that you can know mathematically when each currency will be emitted, when the emission will be reduced and when the last unit will be undermined, it is something unprecedented in the history of money. Not even gold, which occasionally find new deposits, offers that level of certainty.
For more changes made by CEO Vitalik, Ethereum will never look like Bitcoin. If there is something that has characterized Ethereum, it is change.
In the beginning it was said that the Ether had no value as money, which only served to pay the gas for the computing of the complex transactions, so there was no emission limit. After Ether was sued as money, the different monetary policy changes began.
| Date | Update/event | Change in monetary policy |
| July 30, 2015 | Ethereum launch | Fixed 5th reward per block, more up to 4,375 ETH per «uncles» blocks. Inflation rate ~ 14% annual. |
| 2016 | DDOS ATTACK AND EMISSION ADJUSTMENT | Temporary increase in the broadcast by «uncles» block production (up to 4,375 ETH). Inflation rate ~ 10-14%. |
| 2017 | Difficulty pump activation | Indirect reduction of emission by increasing the difficulty of mining, slowing down the creation of blocks. |
| October 16, 2017 | Byzantium | Reward for reduced block from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. Inflation rate ~ 7-10%. |
| February 28, 2019 | Constantinople | Reward for reduced block from 3 eth to 2 eth. Postponed difficulty bomb. Inflation rate ~ 4-6%. |
| January 2, 2020 | Glacier muir | Postponed difficulty pump, maintaining stable emission in ~ 2 eth per block. |
| August 5, 2021 | London | EIP-1559 implementation: Transactions base rate burning. Inflation rate ~ 3-4%, with deflationary periods. |
| September 15, 2022 | The Merge | Transition a Proof of Stake: reduced emission of ~ 13,000 eth/day a ~ 1,280 eth/day. Inflation rate ~ 0.43% annual. |
| April 12, 2023 | Shanghai/Capella | Eth withdrawals enabled, slightly increasing the broadcast by staking. Inflation rate ~ 0.5-1%. |
| March 13, 2024 | Dencun | Layer 1 rates reduction per proto-dankshardingreducing the burning of ETH. Inflation rate ~ 0.7% annual. |
The story of Ethereum, in contrast to Bitcoin’s, looks like the history of improvisation. The problem with all these changes, in addition to the risks introduced by complexity, is that they were by hardforks, that is, forced; You are with us or you are against; Or do, or drown. In the end, This is how things work in companies; You have to follow the leader.
All this makes it impossible for any other cryptocurrency to look like Bitcoin. Again, we insisted that the best thing did Satoshi after Bitcoin, was to disappear. The absence of leader gives that neutrality that everyone else lacks.
Although it seems that in this cycle being Bitcoin is fashionable and is the new narrative, it is not something that Ethereum can achieve with any change. The design principle KISS (Mantenlo Simple) implies that it starts from simplicity. In the case of Ethereum, complexity is already made.