Why Is The Ethereum Price Falling Behind Bitcoin?
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Ethereum’s rate of growth has slowed considerably compared to Bitcoin’s in recent months, to the point where Ethereum would now require a 40% swing just to match BTC’s ascendancy.
ETH Falling Behind BTC
Bitcoin has gained 2.5% on its value over the last month, while Ethereum has lost 17.5%. Looking at the numbers for the last quarter Bitcoin is down 25%, whereas Ethereum fell 45% in the same time period.
Taking quarterly performance as a starting point, in order for Ethereum to catch up with Bitcoin’s rate of growth it would require a 20% growth spurt for Ethereum – and a comparable loss or lengthy stagnation by Bitcoin.
So what’s behind Ethereum’s lagging performance of late?
Ethereum ASIC Miners
When Bitmain released their first dedicated Ethereum mining rigs back at the start of the second quarter, it marked the arrival of a storm that had been predicted for quite some time.
ASIC miners, or application-specific integrated circuit computers, are designed specifically to mine for cryptocurrency, and are many orders of magnitude more efficient than the typical PC.
Having more efficient hardware isn’t problematic in itself, but if large enough mining pools eventually congregate all the processing power in one place it would render Ethereum’s desire for decentralization null and void.
Vitalik Buterin has been ringing the alarm about Bitmain for a while now, and so far all we have to go by is the assurance by Bitmain that they exercise discretion with the distribution of their machines.
Buterin and his team will be rolling out updates like Casper in the coming months, which is designed to move Ethereum away from Proof-of-Work (PoW), and thus, away from miners altogether.
Until then, the uncertainty surrounding Ethereum’s long term decentralization, coupled with the uncertainty from the delayed Casper deployment, may have contributed to its price lag in recent months.
Read more on: https://cryptocoin.news/analysis/why-is-the-ethereum-price-falling-behind-bitcoin-2-18530/
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