Vitalik Buterin tried to develop Ethereum on top of Bitcoin, but was stalled because the developers made it hard to build on top of Bitcoin. Vitalik only then built Ethereum as a separate currency by unitedstatian at reddit404 comments so far
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Has The Cryptocurrency Bubble Burst?
February 1, 2018
by Empire of Lights
Here's a brief excerpt:
I became interested in Bitcoin in around 2010-11. I remember the price being under $10 per coin, which frankly seems a ridiculous price in hindsight given that Bitcoin is above $9,000 today. Still, the price today is a hell of a lot lower than it was just a couple months ago, when I watched it hit $20,000 per coin.
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Ultimately, Bitcoin's developers such as Blockstream chose a highly restrictive path, with high transaction fees because of a strange belief that Bitcoin should only act as a store of value and not a medium of exchange or unit of account. Their network is massively congested, causing fees to spiral upward, with fees in the last few months rising to between $10 and $100! Bitcoin became popular because it offered cheap and quick money transfers. They claim they are positioning Bitcoin to compete against the interbank settlement system, but in reality they are just abandoning Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision of peer-to-peer ecash.
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Bitcoin's developers are working on a second layer solution called lightning network to fix the problem. But simultaneously, they are neglecting cheaper and easier fixes like raising blocksize, to allow more data to fill the blocks. A promised solution ultimately means nothing unless it's delivered, and they haven't delivered, so their congested network is slipping toward irrelevance, as this chart from Business Insider aptly illustrates. Ethereum already has surpassed Bitcoin in terms of transactions, and is closing in on Bitcoin's market cap.
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