Remember all that talk about a “flippening” last year? For a few months, if you scrolled down r/Ethereum or even it’s meme-intensive sibling r/ETHTrader, it seemed inevitable that the market cap of Ethereum would pass that of the current top dog in crypto – Bitcoin. The general consensus of both forums was sooner, rather than later, too.
However, several months on and the change in the prices of these two digital assets tells a different story. Ethereum has dropped from around $1,390 to about $385. The all-time high was over 3.6x greater than the price today. Meanwhile, Bitcoin fell from a high of around $19,974 to around $6,930 at the time of writing. This high is just over 2.88x greater than today’s price. Clearly, therefore, people are losing confidence in Ethereum faster than they are with Bitcoin.
Is a “Flippening” Still Possible?
When comparing the figures of last year’s speculative mania across all of cryptocurrency, it’s important to remember it was just that – a speculative mania. Whilst both Bitcoin and Ethereum did make some technological improvements and greater cases of adoption were reported in both digital assets, neither price spikes were warranted by any sort of fundamental change in either protocol.
Sure, the partial resolution to the scaling debate in Bitcoin called for an increase in price that mirrored the asset’s greater utility. However, according to researchers at BitMEX, the SegWit upgrade last summer has had an immediate impact of around a 41% free reduction for users making the switch. Whilst fees will continue to decrease as more users and institutional bodies (such as Coinbase) adopt it, it hardly warrants a price increase from the $2,700 range to near $20,000. Evidently, a lot of the money flowing into the market during the latter part of 2017 came from folks who cared little about the technology or its implications. These investors just wanted to make a quick buck.
Ethereum’s rise from the start of 2017 to its high point was even more pronounced. This is likely because many who felt they had “missed the boat” on Bitcoin spied a second chance for meteoric gains. It was also driven by ICO investors and contributors. However, without as solid a bedrock of believers in the Ethereum project as Bitcoin, and the ICO funding method coming under regulatory scrutiny along with many contributors being burned in scams, ETH buying pressure has largely dried up. This leaves companies, both legitimate and corrupt, with lots of Ether to cash in. Such selling pressure without equal or greater buying can send the price in one direction only – downwards.
Whilst there are undoubtedly more reasons for the current sell-off in Ether than there are for Bitcoin, this doesn’t mean that a “flippening” cannot happen. It does, however, seem a distant prospect right now.
When considering such a likelihood, it’s important to remember that both projects have very different aims. Ethereum seeks to be a sort of decentralised supercomputer for applications to run on. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is simply digital cash or gold. The market may eventually decide that one of these use cases is more valuable than the other. It may also decide that one of Ethereum’s competitors serves the purpose better than the current market leader for decentralised app creation.
The fact is, along with these radically different use cases, each project faces their own hurdles. The most pronounced of these are currently competition and technological limitations. It therefore seems folly to state a price target for either Ether or Bitcoin. Granted, both projects have a lot of upside potential, but it is nothing more than that at the moment. With the “get rich quick” crowd being brutally burned thus far in 2018, it will take a real fundamental change to initiate the kind of growth required for there to be a change in the current crypto pecking order. Remember, there are no guarantees in this market, least of all a guaranteed “flippening”.
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Goose S 
ScamBuster 
Oh Gee another fake attempt at impartial reporting by a blatant BTC propaganda site. Could ETH become more important than BTC? Well what would you expect the answer to be from a NewsBTC website. Of course the article states NO. It then goes on to mention how it believes any number of up and coming ETH wannabes may find a way to overtake the ETH king but would never mention the hundreds of BTC wannabes, let alone the dreaded BCH that’s already eaten into it’s market share.
This site (NEWSBTC nonetheless, which might be a bit of a giveaway regarding it’s content bias) commenting on any other coins, whilst pretending to give impartial crypto views can be completely disregarded for any accurate, genuine analysis.
If there’s an article on the scene in general, you might find something of value. If there’s another “fake” article comparing a market share competitor to BTC you can basically disregard it as nothing more than paid for advertising and BTC promotion.
Ethereum premined 72,000,000 coins out of it’s 90+million supply. That’s over a 75% PRE-MINE
What does this mean? Simply, that the ETH token is the most highly manipulated crypto asset on the market; further, many ETH tokens were sold as unregistered securites contracts in their own ICO (60 million tokens) to US citizens, which is a clear breach of Federal & State Securities Laws. The media deliberately obfuscates this blatant fact, while demonizing ‘other’ ICO coins and failing to mention Ethereum’s own Law breaching initial public offering.
Further, Vitalik & Co pocketed an additional 12 million tokens in their initial premine, which one can easily view in their genesis code. Reiterated, 60 miillion premine tokens sold in an ICO, and 12 million tokens pocketed by the Developers.
THAT’S why this coin will never ‘flippening’ bitcoin, it’s a classic ponzi scam. Let’s not forget to mention the 3 separate hacks that brought Ethereum to it’s knees, one requiring a ‘hard-fork’ in which the Dev’s proved that ETH is NOT immutable, and can be modified by the will of the developers. All one has to do is take an hour and dive through these FACTS that the media deliberately ignore to understand why Ethereum is nothing but an overly hyped up scam to fleece newbs out of their pocket change.
–Your friend, Scam Buster
Bwaha,
There is no bigger con in the game then Bitcoin now. Here’s a little reminder
from one of BTC’s own developers, you know the most authoritative actual
experts who come from BTC’s own side of the fence;
“Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can
fail,” Hearn writes. “What was meant to be a new, decentralized form
of money that lacked ‘systemically important institutions’ and ‘too big to
fail’ has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a
handful of people.” Yep that’s from BTC’s own developer team.
People who promulgate BTC crap and deflection and smile as they watch all the
average citizens transfer their money to the wealthy few manipulating BTC need
to be held to account. As Buffet says himself BTC has absolutely no
intrinsic worth as it performs no actual required task. It’s not decentralized
at all, it’s not some new way of transferring value. Just like the current
systems, money still goes through paid third parties, only now they are called
miners. Everybody still pays a third party to handle the transfer, It adds zero
in real terms to anything and will be found out. It does no service, provides
no platform for other technologies to build on, it is a failed experiment that
will again as Buffet says “come to a bad ending”.
BTC is now the biggest con going. Ethereum, supported by the likes of Microsoft
and other large fortune 500 companies offers actual technology growth,
providing the platform for more technologies and smart contracts. BTC will fade
to nothing, because it brings nothing. The wealthy will make some damn good
money along the way but those left holding the bag when it finally fails
altogether will loose it all. It’s just matter of when and who gets caught and
loses it all along the way.