Even with market capitalization crossing well over $1.2 trillion, Bitcoin is not everybody’s favorite cryptocurrency. Kenneth Griffin, the CEO of American hedge fund, Citadel, recently shared his views on why he believes Ethereum will ultimately replace Bitcoin as the king coin.
In a summit hosted by the New York Times, the billionaire said,
“Bitcoin-based conception [will be] replaced by the Ethereum-based conception in the next generation of cryptocurrencies.”
According to him, this is because cryptocurrencies based on the Ethereum network have “the benefits of higher transaction speeds [and] lower cost per transaction.” While Ethereum’s average transaction fee was $6.6 at the time of writing, a transaction on the Bitcoin network costs $3.443.
However, Ethereum’s transaction fee and time are slated to go down significantly once the network fully transitions to ETH 2.0 by next year. Griffin reiterated his skepticism of Bitcoin by stating that the digital asset has “no commercial use cases”.
He also added, “Bitcoin is incredibly expensive to manage payments on.” It should be noted that while Bitcoin transactions costs have gone down significantly over the past month. Major card payment providers like American Express and Mastercard charge anywhere between 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction.
Continuing his tirade against the top coin, the CEO claimed that Bitcoin is also “a bigger contributor to global warming than any form of payment we use around the world today in aggregate.” According to a recent report by Digiconomist, Bitcoin’s annual carbon footprint amounts to around 90.48 tonnes of CO2. That amounts to each transaction on the network equaling the carbon footprint of 2,008,657 VISA transactions.
While Bitcoin’s extravagant energy usage has been a point of contention for many, miners of the cryptocurrency are now coming up with ingenious ways to utilize renewable energy resources or surplus energy that would have otherwise been wasted, such as flare gas.
Nevertheless, Griffin believes that “there’s a number of issues that haven’t been addressed by crypto,” such as the high risk of fraud along with rising costs and energy expenditure.
During the summit, he also noted that while blockchain technology itself is “really interesting” and “a powerful way to maintain a decentralized ledger around the world,” it’s ultimately “really not the solution that we need” to solve most of the world’s problems. He added,
“People are very focused on a world of new ideas and new creation. I worry that some of this passion is misplaced when it comes to cryptocurrencies.”
When the long time crypto-critic was asked whether he thinks he missed the crypto train, he said,
“I think that the train is, in some sense, still in the station…. I think it’s very much in the early innings still.”
Keeping the cryptocurrency aversion aside, Griffin’s preference for Ethereum is currently shared by many others in the industry. Just recently, analysts at JP Morgan said that while Bitcoin had probably reached the highest levels for this cycle, Ethereum was poised to reach higher highs due to its varied use cases and intended shift to Proof of Stake that will significantly reduce its energy consumption.
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