Many investors are weighing their options in the cryptocurrency market these days. The two biggest names in the sector draw more attention and analysis than most. We asked two of our cryptocurrency writers to determine whether Bitcoin ( BTC 0.49% ) and Ethereum ( ETH -1.38% ) would be the better choice for an individual investor today.
Read on to see the pros and cons of picking one of these household names over the other.
Image source: Getty Images.
Bigger is just better this time
Anders Bylund (Bitcoin): Most investors in the cryptocurrency space are probably best served by holding both some Ethereum and some Bitcoin. But if I had to choose just one of these sector giants, it would have to be Bitcoin. There are two main reasons for this conclusion.
First, many cryptocurrencies are trying to do the same thing as Ethereum, and some of these alternatives come with significant technology improvements. I count three Ethereum rivals among the top 12 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Solana ( SOL -0.90% ) runs through smart contract transactions much faster than Ethereum. So do Avalanche ( AVAX -1.70% ) and Cardano ( ADA -0.98% ). All three also use more environmentally friendly blockchain structures, giving decentralized app developers another reason to select a different smart contract platform over the leading Ethereum solution.
Taken together, this trio is already worth 25% of Ethereum’s total market value. All have also outperformed Ethereum in 2021, often by a large margin:
Ethereum Price data by YCharts
Bitcoin has rivals but the simpler value-storage and money-moving functions of this cryptocurrency leave less room for disruptive challengers. Add up the five largest digital currencies not named Bitcoin in this part of the cryptocurrency sector, and you get a total market value of $107 billion — a mere 12% of Bitcoin’s dominant footprint.
That’s where my second reason to prefer Bitcoin comes in. The cryptocurrency industry’s grandfather holds an…
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