Ethereum's smart contracts are obviously more developer friendly and easier to implement. Ethereum smart contracts are the go-to for dapps, despite having a significantly smaller userbase and market cap than bitcoin.

To say Bitcoin smart contracts are equal to Ethereum smart contracts would be akin to comparing Myspace to Facebook.

Bitcoin originated smart contracts, but they were severely limited due to a filter that was imposed. Arbitrary scrypt execution was seen as a security risk (despite not being Turing-complete), so a set of scrypt templates were whitelisted. I think all clients would accept blocks with any scrypt in them, but most pools would only accept transactions with the fixed templates.

Bitcoin does have enough flexibility to do trustless cross-chain trading though, so it's possible to do dapp logic in Eth and manipulate BTC funds indirectly. (IIRC)

And MySpace was better all around in objective terms, but facebook was dumbed down for mass appeal so it won out?

This is a false narrative.

Facebook better optimized for the fact that most people are too stupid to avoid using full-page background images and auto-playing music.

I thought it was a lot cooler back then. People got their own customized little places about themselves, maybe with some fun media playing. Now it's all boring and sterilized.

It was a blessing and a curse.

The internet in general is probably "better designed" now, but also way more homogenized and boring.

>was dumbed down for mass appeal so it won out?

thats usually how it works

Yes, I just don't think the analogy worked very well.

Discreet-log contracts are a miracle, but in the same way that a dancing bear is a miracle. There's no way they can compete with smart contracts on a platform designed with smart contracts in mind, at least on a technical level. (Maybe we'll all end up using discrete-log contracts and their descendants due to network effects, but I doubt it. Or maybe some richer zero-knowledge contract-enforcement scheme can be devised on bitcoin... Maybe.)

Ethereum as a platform has made many bad design decisions. It's not really suitable for a lot of things; including, well, things it was marketed for (unstoppable, uncensorable, scalable applications).

I'm sure something better for those design goals than Ethereum will come along, but I seriously doubt it's going to be Bitcoin.

Cardano, although still not ready for primetime, seems like a likely candidate. EDIT : I do work for IOHK and I am biased.

Surely you haven't heard of Simplicity then. A potential replacement for Bitcoin's current scripting language.

https://blockstream.com/2018/11/28/en-simplicity-github/

Bitcoin was literally designed with contracts (programs deciding transactions) in mind from its inception. Ethereum is just script kiddies piling JavaScript onto blockchain and calling it the greatest invention in human history.

They're an afterthought in Bitcoin. Its main goal was to be a decentralized payments system.

They're absolutely not an afterthought in Bitcoin, and in fact some of the functionality of Bitcoin Script was disabled to prevent some of the disasters that have occurred due to poor engineering decisions in Ethereum.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script