Andreas Antonopoulos took critics to task over his decision to write a book about Ethereum and other altcoins in a recent Q&A session after a query claiming he was “not remaining faithful” to Bitcoin.
‘Don’t Be Under Any Illusion’
In the session, published last week, the celebrated cryptocurrency educator and Bitcoin proponent defended his motivation to write ‘Mastering Ethereum,’ which follows his two highly-successful installments of ‘Mastering Bitcoin.’
“Don’t be under any illusion that what I’m doing in writing ‘Mastering Ethereum’ is writing a book about why you should invest in the particular chain launched by Vitalik Buterin and many others back in 2014,” he said.
…It also applies to Ethereum Classic, Rootstock, Lisq, EOS, it applies to a variety of other virtual machine, smart contract-based blockchains.
Antonopoulos’ decision to write a dedicated altcoin guide had appeared to take many fans by surprise. Known for his tireless support of Bitcoin, the news revealed an inaccurate view of Anthopoulos as critical of blockchain projects which, as he describes them, are “not-quite-decentralized.”
This is a misunderstanding, he added, explaining that his support of Ethereum and other altcoins had nothing to do with “providing better answers than Bitcoin,” but rather “different answers.”
Trade-Offs
“These technologies as a whole are about changing the trade-offs between security and flexibility. Bitcoin is by far the most secure, the most decentralized and provides robust monetary systems. That’s not the purpose of Ethereum and it doesn’t compete with Bitcoin at that,” he continued.
…That doesn’t mean that this technology is useful or useless… does it mean that this technology is interesting? Absolutely.
As market attention focuses on Bitcoin this month, altcoins, and specifically Ethereum, have faced mounting uncertainty over their future role.
A report from Tetras Capital last month, dubbed the ‘Bearish Thesis,’ highlighted fears the coin’s price was “significantly decoupled from the Ethereum network’s current and near-term technological state.”
“We believe [Ethereum] lacks the crucial characteristics required for a dominant [store of value], and we see a low probability of [Ethereum] taking the reign from the current crypto-asset leader, [Bitcoin],” researchers added.
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