One different between Ethereum and Bitcoin is in the approach to money and value.
I'm going to provide two heavily paraphrased quotes to differentiate this:
Bitcoin value prop:
"Value is driven by scarcity and a credible monetary policy that enforces scarcity"
Ethereum value prop:
"Ethereum will be valuable as we build Dapps/Defi as this will drive utility and therefore value into the underlying asset used to pay for this utility which is ETH"
The key diference here is that in the bitcon world view the asset is valuable due to internal properties, in the Ethereum world view the asset is valuable based on external factors.
I believe this has a direct use on long term value of each of these assets (and in reality any asset which seeks to build value through utility). The point being that if your asset relies on extrinsic value generation, then there is nothing to stop everything valuable being ported to a new network over a long enough time frame.
Yes Network effects are a thing, but networks do change over time:
- Telegram > Phone > VoIP
- Post > Email > Social Apps
I don't hold the belief that a smart contract are not useufl. Hell Lightning is excellent and there are certainly ways to mitigate trust through other structured contract arrangements, however, it would be strange to assume that the contract platform is the value.
The $ or the asset holds the value in a traditional contract, not the paper.
It is my belief that long term Smart Contracts will merely be "hired when required" and as such there's no real need to acrue value in the utility asset, you just biy it when required - i.e. you just pay Bitcoin for the execution of the contract.
Which begs the question surely there is value as there will be an amount of bitcoin "locked in Ethereum" at any one time in order to execute smart contracts. Well not quite as out architecture now looks like this:
Which means we have three sperate areas for value to acrue:
- Value Store: Where people are storing their value longer term.
- Interop Process: How do we move across from one environment to another.
- Execution Environment: How do we secure funds and pay for execution.
It my belief that Bitcoin provides the best monetary qualities required for a Value Store. So the next question would be were we to use Bitcoin inside a smart contract, would it naturally
In reality it is a deterministic contract which is evaluated true or false and wil take the actions specified.
When applied to money, this is general in one of x situations please pay money to y.
Everything else we build around these contracts is really interfacing with this world in order to take the minuatea of "important decisions" and ensuring these always execute in a provably deterministic way.