It's not like the research is exclusive. Note that any research done on bitcoin can also be shared and used on other projects. Litecoin for example, which is a fork of bitcoin, is now benefiting from bitcoin's R&D by using Segwit first.
Likewise, other blockchains can teach a lesson for bitcoin. For example sha256 proved not to be a good hashing algo because the reliance on ASICs, which centralizes mining. Another important area in research is the development of other greener forms of blockchain security such as Proof of Stake, which will most likely replace Proof Of Work once perfected.
In a way, when I think of bitcoin, I think of it as this whole massive umbrella project that includes all the alternative blockchain projects too, that can all share their research / experiences / ideas with each-other. This is the beauty of open source software.
Theoretically speaking all algorithms are able to be optimized by ASICs. ASIC resistance is not about making ASICs impossible, it's about making them expensive. But any secure global PoW currency is going to have enough mining reward to drive ASIC development.
The really ASIC resistant algorithms will have an R&D overhead of hundreds of millions. Which means if one player can get in really and keep their R&D secret or patented, they can amortize costs and more easily block newcomers. Overall, even without intentional barriers, you will have a much more centralized coin in the long run.
For any coin intending to become worth billions or trillions, you really want to embrace ASICs and design a PoW that makes it as easy as possible for newcomers to profitably develop and manufacture ASICs.
It's a weird concept to accept but actually the really interesting and useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources (provably wasting electricity) which are committed to one and exactly one interpretation of history.
Stake based systems lock or burn or manage coins, but there's no provable tether from those coins (defined only within the system) to the real world.
PoW has an undeniable tether to the real world in the form of waste.
Thought experiment:
Say there's a PoW currency A, and PoS currency B.
Alice mines A.
Now Bob wants currency A, but he can't afford to mine currency A, because he needs special hardware.
So Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B, and Bob is happy with A. Now the question is, would Alice see that she "destroyed physical resources" for currency B? (Yes, to Alice she had to destroy physical resources)
Later, Alice wants to transact with Charlie, who also holds currency B. She transfers her B to Charlie, that was bought using A. Would Charlie care that Alice had to "destroy physical resources" to get B? (No, that information is useless in a PoS system)
Some time in the future, currency B becomes very popular (as it's just as secure and not wasting resources like currency A). Alice wants more B too, so she exchanges her B with the masses. Eventually, currency B takes over A in popularity, and by that time, Alice has exchanged all her A for B. The question is, would Alice now view that to get B, she had to "destroy physical resources"? Would that fact matter if she continues to transact with Charlie?
There is no reason for Alice to want B, a less secure money than A which they already hold. If Alice were perfect mathematician, this exchange would never occur.
Oh, and then there were cryptocurrencies C, D and F too, but that's a different thought experiment.
If a transaction does not do this, it can be guaranteed to be insecure.
>Faster block times means she'll get her coffee sooner
Maybe. Or maybe the merchant doesn't get paid for coffee at all (because faster blocktime means more orphans)!
Sorry, didn't mean to bring out the ASIC debate so strongly - my point was mainly that the research is not exclusive, and can be shared between projects, as in the litecoin using Segwit example.
It's kind of weird to compare Bitcoin to Ethereum. They are both blockchain-based, but they're in completely different categories. It's like comparing shares in Exxon to an account of Wells Fargo. Sure, you can use them both as a unit of accounting but they're not really the same.
Ethereum is an autonomous app hosting corporation. Bitcoin is an autonomous ledger hosting corporation. They will succeed in their respective markets based on demand for ledgers and apps, the utility of decentralization in those two spaces, and their usability relative to competitors.
Ethers can be used as a currency, but so can oil, corn, and Beenie Babies. Bitcoin's purpose is currency, and the ecosystem around it is optimized for that purpose.
Ethereum's purpose is executing computational contracts, and the ecosystem is optimizing for that. You can compare the two the way you compare boats and fish, but anyone who puts them in the same category without caveat is really missing the bigger picture.
Each primitive operation needs its own blockchain for its value to be determined accurately. When multiple token are implemented over a single blockchain, for eg colored/custom coins, it cannot accurately measure the value of a unit.
In case of functional language, one could perhaps imagine a lisp blockchain with paul graham's 7 primitives implemented as an opcode (stack based interpretor is irrelevant), which would be turing complete but will suffer from the problem of determining the true value of each opcode; the cheapest one will always be abused as evident on ethereum (suicide function's cheapness was spammed).
Both of these are highly contentious if not outright wrong.
Bitcoin's network is the most centralized at the moment. Bitmain is a great example of that. As for security, Ethereum is currently spending more $$ per block than Bitcoin to secure the chain.
However there has been a few forks to mitigate DDoS attacks.
It was an application that failed.
The hardfork that came after the burning failure of the DAO moved account values from the DAO to a new contract.
The protocol remained the same.
The underlying code is overridden for a single block before reasserting it with full authority but it does not affect the protocol.
The clients and nodes in the network communicate and operate just as before, in fact, a client without the hardfork code can still receive and process the hardfork block but reject it due to not being compatible with it's consensus machine.
However, this is one layer above the protocol that makes up the Ethereum network. The protocol is merely interested in the validity of a block, not how to achieve this conclusion.
If you wrote a client that simply accepted all blocks as valid, it would accept this hardfork without problem, sans not having a correct balance record anymore.
What it would not accept is one of the newer hardforks because those actually changed the protocol and EVM to some extend, making it not understandable to old clients. Those could be interpreted as actual protocol changes.
1. Multiple popular clients implementing the same consensus algorithm. In theory, this means that bugs show up faster and you end up with something closer to the designed specification. In practice, if you ever find one tiny little difference (even a case where one has a bug and the other doesn't) you can fork the network and take advantage of the nodes that will be on the minority chain.
Eth defends this by suggesting you run multiple clients. Well, now you've doubled the resource requirements, and you force users to come up with some contingency plan in the event that the clients disagree. And if the two clients you pick are different from the two clients of much of the rest of the network, you can still fork the network.
2. Super complex contract vm. The thing so far has been a massive magnet for bugs. Bitcoin's relatively simple contact engine still has vulnerabilities being discovered in 2017 (mostly minor performance issues at this point), eth is likely to be finding bugs in their much more complicated (both theoretically and in practice) system.
3. Asic resistant PoW. No PoW is asic resistant in theory, you can always make hardware specifically specialized to your task. All it means is that eventually someone will figure out how to do it, and when they do the up-front cost may be billions of dollars - a cost that only one player will ever be able to afford, especially if they keep all their optimizations secret. Bad choice unless you think you can switch to PoS in time, but that's a bad idea for a completely separate set of reasons.
4. Centralized dev team with obvious conflicts of interest and no scruples about interfering with the networks operation to get stuff done. If a government decides to compromise when Ethereum, you could get pretty far by compromising just three people (Lubin, Wood, Buterin). Bitcoin has no such group, the devs are an amorphous blob who all suspect eachother of being CIA and would never accept a proposal merely because of the name of the submitter.
5. General support for hard forks. If you wanted to get a bad change into bitcoin, you'd mostly need to hard fork. The community actively resists hardforks. Change is very hard, but at least that means bad change is also very hard.
6. Really sketchy blockchain download. You trust a hash from a miner and then start downloading blocks after that. This means the miner can easily cheat you. Also means you can get started a lot faster, but it's a big security problem.
7. Really bad scalability. Much worse than Bitcoin's. The EVM is very expensive, and a simple transaction is going to tax you computer a lot more than on Bitcoin. Doing 1M txns per day will probably not be possible for most nodes, and Eth is within an order of magnitude of hitting. Eth also doesn't have a flagship application yet, but all of the current ones under construction do not play nice with the scaling constraints. BTC is struggling to do payments. How will will eth cope when it's doing:
Payments
Prediction markets
Name resolution
Content attribution
And who knows what else
Scalability is a security concern, because when the shit hits the fan you are going to have a bunch of incumbents pulling every which way to make scaling work. Eth has already made massive compromises to keep up with their current load. It's going to get worse. My guess is that eth will continue to favor scaling over security, and they will end up in a 12 full nodes worldwide type of situation. That's very very very much worse than Bitcoin's situation of 12 miners.
8. In general, eth culture just doesn't consider security. They think blockchains are largely magic shields that do all the hard work for you, and despite being bitten a bunch of times already they continue prioritizing innovation. Fine, but you asked why I think bitcoin is more secure, and a culture of mistrust and slow adoption goes a long way to achieving security.
I could probably find another 10 things to talk about but I'll stop here. Ethereum has selling points over Bitcoin, but they are not security or decentralization by a long shot.
3 people control 95% of all hashing power on the network!
http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2015/09/29/Bitcoin-is-100...
Myth. There is not even a single thing you can do with ethereum that you cannot with bitcoin. OTOH, you can do money with bitcoin, but you can't do it on ethereum because neither is it a true blockchain nor is it immutable ledger or decentralised either.
I know you can do it on Bitcoin too, but has anyone done it? It took a team less than 2 months to build this OTC market on Ethereum.
Bitcoin can do one type of money with extremely rigid parameters that is volatile and not efficient for payment transfers. Ether is similar but at least has lower transaction costs, but Ethereum is well on it's way to host a hundred other types of money by the end of 2017.
>Ether is similar but at least has lower transaction costs
Myth. Do the math. Ethereum is much more expensive at similar parameters.
Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure, safest option of all the cryptocurrencies, including the nasty miner situation happening right now.
Ethereum is in second place, but the dev team has worked hard to maintain full control over the direction of the protocol, including frequent hardforks and promise of future hardforks.
Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not, but if the valuation were to pass Bitcoin's I think it would be fair to state that it's because the market has chosen to prefer low security, low decentralisation, high (yet unrealized) innovation potential over a decentralized payment system.
I wouldn't consider it a bad thing for bitcoin, and I also wouldn't consider Bitcoin dead or misplaced if it gets passed by ethereum in market cap. The decentralization is what is meaningful to me, and I don't know anything else remotely close.