Where do I even begin in addressing my thesis that ETH and the ethereum blockchain is much better than bitcoin and the BTC blockchain because they are far superior in flexibility of applications and in number of possible future applications? To begin, ETH is much better than bitcoin because it has transparency that bitcoin lacks. There is no doubt about ETH’s inventor and for those in the bitcoin community that marginalize assertions that Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity is a collaboration between a State authority and a State intelligence agency as a wild conspiracy theory, the fact of the matter is that Satoshi’s identity still remains unknown except to State intelligence agencies as is almost certain at this point (as I will discuss shortly). Ether wins the debate of transparency in a landslide as its inventor, Vitalik Buterin, is one of the most prominent and public figures in the cryptocurrency world.
Though the vast majority of bitcoin HODLers and traders summarily dismiss the transparency argument as insignificant, I believe this point of contention to be hugely paramount to its use. A 1996 NSA white paper exists that discusses the SHA-256 cryptographic standard of bitcoin in great detail called How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash created unsubstantiated allegations that Satoshi was a State intelligence agent. However, this article was largely responsible for the since proven-as-false narrative that spread like wildfire through the bitcoin community that bitcoin usage gave their owners complete anonymity. The use of cash grants its user far more anonymity than the use of bitcoin, where every transaction is documented in perpetuity on the blockchain. Even today, when BTCs are demanded by black hat hackers as part of ransomware schemes, I am not so confident that these BTC thieves are not tracked down and eventually arrested. I believe that they are, but that their arrests are just not reported in the media.
Of course, the above referenced NSA white paper does not serve as proof that bitcoin was an NSA invention as people steal ideas from each other all the time in product development. For example, allegedly Apple’s Steve Jobs stole the idea of the computer mouse from Xerox, Microsoft’s Bill Gates allegedly stole the GUI template from Apple, a belief that inspired a 1988 Apple lawsuit against Microsoft’s Windows 2.0 OS for copying 198 elements of the original Mac OS, and on and on. For US Presidents that always publicly condemn Chinese theft of US intellectual property, and in many cases, rightly so, they could also easily condemn US companies’ regular IP theft from other US companies, though they never do. So, perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto only co-opted the use of the technology that became the cryptographic standard of bitcoin from the NSA.
More problematic, however, than the thinly supported NSA bitcoin connection is the following. Dan Kaminsky, one of the top cybersecurity experts in the world tried to hack bitcoin several years ago, state that he thought hacking bitcoin’s cryptography would be a breeze before attempting to do so, but was ultimately unsuccessful in doing so. Before I explain the significance of this event that raises my suspicion that bitcoin is a Trojan Horse, a suspicion I do not have with ETH and the ethereum blockchain because of its transparency, let’s start with the question: Why should we care what Dan Kaminsky said about bitcoin and who is Dan Kaminsky anyway?
Dan Kaminsky is the cybersecurity expert that discovered in 2008 an existing fundamental flaw in Domain Name System (DNS) security that made all websites vulnerable to cache poisoning in 2008 and would have allowed hackers to redirect any client servers that used DNS protocol to alternative servers for unlimited criminal activities. From my understanding, this extremely dangerous exploitable security vulnerability had remained undiscovered for many years, possibly for decades, and Dan Kaminsky was the security expert that uncovered it. This vulnerability was so severe, despite remaining undiscovered for many year, that a black hat hacker could have used the DNS security flaw to shut down the entire world wide web and crash every single website in the world that used DNS protocol if he or she had so desired. Of course, it this had been done, countless trillions of dollars in the global economy would have been destroyed, never to be recovered. Consequently, Kaminsky’s discovery gave him enormous credibility in the cybersecurity world. In fact, Kaminsky’s security knowledge is so top-notch that while many in the world once believed Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto simply because Mr. Wright provided a digital signature that he claimed was “proof” he was Satoshi Nakamoto, Kaminsky quickly rebutted such nonsense and clearly delineated why Wright’s digital signature was cleverly deceptive but provided zero proof of his claim.
Consequently, when Kaminsky attempted to hack bitcoin’s security protocol and failed and discussed his findings in 2013, I stood at attention and listened. Kaminsky stated, “Bitcoin made a technical choice during its initial design that allowed some people to do far more work than others, simply by having a graphical accelerator or even by designing custom hardware. This is the precise capability that large financial actors and nation states have above and beyond the private sector’s capacity to produce.” In plain English, Kaminsky stated that the only people or institutions he believed had the capacity to build such beautifully simple cryptography to secure bitcoin were Central Banks and State sponsored actors. Furthermore, in an interview Kaminsky stated that bitcoin’s security architecture required massive financial resources that he believe only a State sponsor could provide and that no cypherpunk would ever possess.
Kaminsky stated, “When I first looked at the code, I was sure I was going to be able to break it. The way the whole thing was formatted was insane. Only the most paranoid, painstaking coder in the world could avoid making mistakes.” Kaminsky went on to state that he had identified nine methods to attack bitcoin’s blockchain that he believed would have a high probability of success but that each time he tried to hack bitcoin’s code, the code “ self-healed”, almost as if were assisted by artificial intelligence, and immediately deleted his attack. “I came up with beautiful bugs. But every time I went after the code there was a line that addressed the problem.” He continued, “I’ve never seen anything like it. ” Whoever designed bitcoin, Kaminsky marveled, is a “world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language [and] understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking.”
Consider the implications of Kaminsky’s above comments that are almost never discussed by bitcoin owners that relentlessly praise bitcoin as the money that will free the world, and I believe that one would arrive at the conclusion that ethereum is much better than bitcoin. A man that had spent more than a decade testing security for the largest global corporations in the world and trying to hack their most secure software and hardware had never seen anything like the security embedded into the code of bitcoin. This likely again points to a State authority being intimately involved in its development versus a bunch of humanitarian cypherpunks that wanted to save humanity from the global banking machine. (Editor’s Note: Rest in peace Dan Kaminsky. Mr. Kaminsky unexpectedly died a couple of months ago, with diabetic ketoacidosis cited as the cause).
Furthermore, this also implies that almost certainly State intelligence agencies like the MI6, Mossad, the CIA and the NSA have known Satoshi’s identity for a very long time, as Kaminsky’s conclusion that Satoshi is a “world class programmer” to a pool of about three hundred people in the entire world. Thus, the narrative that uncovering Satoshi’s identity is like searching for a needle in a haystack because there are nearly eight billion people on planet Earth is patently false. Furthermore, of those three hundred programmers, perhaps less than a quarter of them would have the specific skills to design the cryptographic security imbedded into bitcoin, further narrowing the pool of eligible Satoshis down to just 75 or so. Who, of rational mind, believes that if a State intelligence agency is searching for the identity of a specific person among a pool of 75 people, let alone just 300 people, would not be able to identify that person? No one. So the whole narrative that Satoshi wanted to retain anonymity for obvious reasons that he would be arrested and jailed were his identity known is a thoroughly unintellectual one.
Important Differences Exist in ETH v. BTC Blockchain Technology
The blockchain that serves as the backbone for all cryptocurrencies is also highly misunderstood by many and many people mistakenly believe that all blockchains are created equal, much as four nine fine gold is always the same in quality, intrinsic properties, and consistency. This is not true. Vitalik Buterin deliberately provided much more flexibility for the blockchain that serves as the foundation for the Ethereum blockchain that serves as the foundation of Ether over Bitcoin in that the Ethereum blockchain contains a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create “smart contracts“, a property of the blockchain that I will use to protect property rights of my skwealthacademy coursework when I finally am able to launch my academy to make the consequences as painful as possible for people that attempt to illegally copy and replicate my coursework for illegal re-sale. In researching how I can use blockchain technology to protect the skwealthacademy IP upon launch, I discovered that ETH’s blockchain technology v. BTC’s blockchain technology is much more suitable for my purposes. Again, this makes ETH and Ethereum much better than bitcoin in my mind. A Turing-complete language can be used to emulate a Turing machine, a construct invented by computer scientist Alan Turing that theoretically can solve any computational problem. Buterin developed Ethereum to address this purpose whereas Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention of Bitcoin did not, so this developmental purpose provides more flexibility in usage for the ethereum blockchain over that of Bitcoin’s and makes the ETH blockchain more likely to be used as continuing new uses are developed for the blockchain in society.
The consensus algorithm that required proof of work to validate bitcoin ownership invented by Satoshi was a breakthrough for cryptocurrencies and this algorithm reminded me of the calculus class I attended in junior high in which our teacher did not allow us to just write the final answer to a complex problem but that for our answer to be marked correct, we had to provide proof of work to illustrate how we derived the final answer. Since then proof of stake has also been developed as an alternative solution to proof of work, but in any case, bitcoin has provided some useful innovations as the first to enter the crypto game. However, bitcoin’s initial mover advantage has since been usurped by Ethereum at this point moving forward even thought bitcoin still remains king atop the mountain in market cap, though I don’t believe this will be for long, as the wishful thinking of a $1M btc price is highly unlikely despite the selling the book proclamations of bitcoin billionaires like Michael Saylor that state a prediction of $1M bitcoin prices are far too conservative. Just as small player Apple quickly overtook market leader giant IBM once, Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin as the dominant cryptocurrency during the lifespan of cryptocurrencies. At only a current 2.8X market cap of ETH, it would take much for a rapid increase in ETH price and a continuing crash in BTC prices for ETH to overtake BTC as the market cap leader.
Back to ETH. Dan Kaminsky and others have proven, thus far, that the cryptography of BTC is secure. Vitalik Buterin has concluded that attacks to steal BTC then will avoid attempts to hack the cryptography but to concentrate on deceiving the network regarding the order of BTC transactions executed. Logically this makes complete sense. However, one risk that everyone has missed, regarding BTC’s continued viability, a risk that is real, clear and still present, is one that I discussed in detail here (Note: Only skwealthacademy patrons have access to this particular article). Furthermore, as my patrons that have read this article know, due to a specific distinction between ETH and BTC, ETH has far less to almost no vulnerability to this risk that plagues BTC at the current time, which is another checkmark for ETH and the ethereum blockchain over BTC. There are other advantages of ETH over BTC that exist but for the point of brevity, I will leave those other discussed advantages to the access of my skwealthacademy patrons.
CONCLUSION
Due to ETH’s greater application potential for its blockchain in which it can be used as the foundation for a wide range of decentralized applications including smart contracts and applications with arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and state transition functions, as well as protocols that provide lesser risk for attacks than BTC (non-cryptography issues as BTC’s cryptography is secure as discussed above) I believe that ETH is the future of cryptocurrencies. Please note that I am in the process of completely migrating off of YouTube and that you can find all new video content creation at Rokfin here, a platform in which I have already earned more income in two weeks versus sixteen years of content creation on YouTube due to YouTube’s demonetization of nearly every video posted on that platform. Please support me at Rokfin if you find value from my content and are, more importantly, able to do so. You may also support me on Patreon and at GoFundMe. Continue to access all my articles, even this one, days in advance on my news site here. I have posted an updated version of my e-Book The Golden Gift, available for free, last week and will post a second free e-Book soon for all those that subscribe to my free newsletter here. Recently, on my patreon platform, I have posted an enormous amount of exclusive cryptocurrency content, including a 40-minute and 50-minute podcast and an article discussing the most important bitcoin price predictive metric of 2021 that I have yet to see anyone online ever discuss.
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