Ethereum & Bitcoin General Comparison
Ethereum & Bitcoin comparison
Last updated
Ethereum & Bitcoin comparison
Last updated
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)