BTC Vs ETH — Difference Between the Biggest Top Two Cryptocurrencies

Quecko Inc
3 min readNov 26, 2021

In these times, blockchain technology continues its journey to gain momentum towards achieving a goal in almost every industry. A significant number of people are stepping into cryptocurrency, making it expand by leaps and bounds.

In a short span of time, digital currencies skyrocketed in value and interest. Among all leading cryptocurrencies, two of them, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are at the top today and most popular, contributing to the sector’s growth.

This article is going to guide you about both of these and their tendency to rise up in coming days and some major differences they have.

Bitcoin; the First Cryptocurrency:

Invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is the leading digital currency with the highest market capitalization. It was the first crypto that used to function independently, which means the P2P transactions were conducted without any central authority, control of any government, bank or financial institution. Based on a decentralized ledger, Bitcoin solves a number of problems by adopting the method of Proof-of-Work to verify the transactions.

Bitcoin is seen as digital gold or gold 2.0 due to its feature of scarcity and also the durability like some precious metals. This digital asset is stored in digital wallets and traded on cryptocurrency exchanges.

The mining process of Bitcoin ensures that malicious performance is kicked out of the room, making the transaction safer and secure.

Ethereum; winning the race:

After Bitcoin, Ethereum is the biggest network powered by its native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH). The programming language used by Ethereum is known as Solidity that is used to run smart contracts on the blockchain. Developers are still in the process to create their main use cases and offering financial services like nonfungible tokens(NFTs) with the help of dApps.

Ethereum-built dApps allow Ether and some other crypto assets to be lent out to borrowers to earn interest.

Some Main Differences:

Though, both of these cryptos are best in their products and services till date but still have some differences. Let’s have a look.

Bitcoin and Ethereum both are based on distributed ledgers but have some differences also. Bitcoin serves as a digital equivalent of gold used to store value, while Ether is used to power the Ethereum network and its applications.

Ethereum tokens are issued by following the most popular standard ERC-20. Bitcoin adopts the platform of the Omni layer for creating and trading currencies.

Another significant difference among them is the time taken to add new blocks of data to confirm transactions. Bitcoin network adds blocks on an average of 10 minutes, while Ethereum takes about 15 seconds only.

Both networks have different public wallet addresses that are unique and allow users to receive funds, comparable to an International Bank Account Number (IBAN), which is used to identify the bank and country of the client. On Bitcoin, the address starts with a 1, a 3, or bc1 and on Ethereum it starts with 0x.

Conclusion:

Yet somehow same, but these different networks have been the best till today in this fast-growing niche of blockchain. Crypto space is spreading its area with the help of these ever-growing networks of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

--

--