The price of bitcoin has reached an all-time-high when compared to ether, data from TradingView shows. This means more people are choosing to stick with “digital gold” than the “world computer.”
Bitcoin’s strength against Ethereum is calculated by looking at how exchanges value ether against the currency. According to prices on crypto exchange Binance, one ether is worth just 0.021 bitcoin. This is down 82 percent since ether reached its highest point against bitcoin in January, 2018, at 0.123 bitcoin. This shows that ether’s buying value has diminished much more rapidly than bitcoin, which has become a “safe-haven” for investment after altcoin prices have continued to slump.
Part of the problem appears to be that Ethereum has barely scratched the surface of its 5-10 year plan for scaling the network. It has tentatively pegged January 2020 as the start of phase 0 of its scaling plans, but there is a lot of work still to be done.
However, it’s not that Bitcoin development has been moving that much faster—it just has lower ambitions (on the protocol level). There have been few changes to the Bitcoin network or hard forks over the last year. There are upgrades in the works, namely to increase privacy and help it integrate with Lightning, but these are relatively minor.
This is just another example of bitcoin’s increasing control over crypto. Its market dominance is at its highest in the last two years and trading of bitcoin is nearly three times higher than the next ranking cryptocurrency, ether. Is everyone reluctantly becoming bitcoin maximalists or are we about to see another altcoin rally?
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