Strategist: Bitcoin more likely to be successful 'in the long run' than Ethereum

One reason strategist and investment guru Lyn Alden isn't invested in Ether is she considers the Ethereum network an “unfinished product” when compared with Bitcoin.

Alden’s economic analysis of Ethereum released today compares the smart contract network to the Concorde jet: functional as it has “a ton of smart developers working on it,” but unlikely to become an economically sustainable project in the long run. She ran down some of Ethereum’s main features as evidence of her assertion, calling the use-case of many decentralized apps “circular and speculative.”

In addition, she said the network’s nodes are more likely to be at risk of a centralized attack “if there were to be some government crackdown on third-party node services.” Alden said regulators wouldn’t "necessarily bring down Ethereum" but could effectively threaten the use-case by making the apps harder to run.

Alden summarized her thoughts on Twitter:

“Ethereum could indeed do very well over the next year in terms of price, but as long as it's transforming its base layer, it remains a speculation in alpha development, rather than a finished/stable product.”

On the other hand, the investment guru said that Bitcoin (BTC), with its fixed supply of 21 million coins, didn’t have the "arbitrary monetary policy" of Ethereum in addition to saying there was a "cultural divide" between the two networks.

“Ethereum attracts more of a gamer culture, and more experimentation,” said Alden, pointing out that some of the projects built on the network had resulted in failure. “Maybe in another 5 years when Ethereum 2.0 is in place and functioning for a while, with consistent monetary policy for that whole time, it can be considered largely a finished project like Bitcoin. Until then, it’s experimental.”

Last year, Alden said she became “quite bullish” on Bitcoin given its scarcity, halving, and potential of the crypto asset to act as a backdrop to inflation. She added in her analysis of Ethereum that she preferred Bitcoin for its “risk/reward opportunity” claiming that for all the coin’s price volatility, there was an “upside potential.”

“[Bitcoin] doesn’t move fast and break things like many altcoins do, but it moves slowly and has a tendency to get things right,” she said. “The more ideas and innovations that pop up in the broader digital asset industry, the more Bitcoin developers have to work with for their protocol and ecosystem.”