---
description: Ethereum & Bitcoin comparison
---

# Ethereum & Bitcoin General Comparison



| <p><br></p>                        | 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)            |
