Ethereum & Bitcoin General Comparison
Ethereum & Bitcoin comparison
| Ethereum | Bitcoin |
Consensus Mechanism | Proof of Stake | Proof of Work |
Accounting System | Account Model | UTXO Model |
Public Key Cryptography | secp256k1 elliptic curve | secp256k1 elliptic curve |
Stale/Orphan Blocks | Rewarded (Ommer Blocks) | Not Rewarded |
Block Time | Approx every 12 seconds | Approx every 10 minutes |
Network Difficulty | Adjusted every block | Every 2016 blocks |
Language Support | Turing Complete smart contracts, custom VM operations cost gas | non-Turing Complete scripts |
Smart Contract Development | High-level programming language support, Ethereum Virtual Machine | Limited scripting language support |
Decentralized Applications (dApps) | Supports dApp development and execution | Limited support for dApps |
Block Size Limit | No hard limit, but limited by block gas limit | 1 MB block size limit (with SegWit up to 4 MB) |
Transaction Fees | Variable and determined by gas limit and gas price | Fixed and determined by the network |
Monetary Policy | Inflationary (max supply not fixed) | Deflationary (max supply fixed at 21 million BTC) |
Governance | Decentralized, with Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) | Decentralized, with Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) |
Forks | Hard forks (incompatible protocol changes) and soft forks (compatible protocol changes) | Soft forks only (compatible protocol changes) |
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