Ether Vs Bitcoin - Evaluating future prospects
I have a belief regarding cryptocurrencies. It's pretty simple. The cryptocurrency with the most developer interest and momentum will win. Developer interest in open source projects is a strong indicator of what becomes a standard online.
So I decided to take a peek at github, here's what I saw 11,200 repositories for bitcoin vs 3,563 for ethereum. **for non technical folks - repositories are where developers are storing code for projects** However, you have to note that Bitcoin was released in January 2009 and Ethereum was released in July 2015. Total volume isn't the best measure, let's take a look at the languages used.
For people who don't pay attention to development trends - one observation of high significance is Go popping up in the popularity list associated with Ethereum. Why is Go in particular an important sign? It's almost as fast and less clumsy compared to C++ and C Sharp. At the same time, it's relatively new. People who know Go are experienced and choosing to learn it because it is better. In my opinion, it will be the default backend language for most Silicon Valley tech companies in the next 5 years. Those same people are choosing to play around with Ethereum using Go.
Although there are a lot more repo's associated with Bitcoin (most likely due to its longevity) - there are 5k wikis on github for ethereum vs. 4k for bitcoin. So people are writing and contemplating about ethereum even though they haven't necessarily started projects involving it yet.
We've had splits in the technical community before. Two years ago, Angular was the dominant Javascript framework and React was a new with a small following. Angular's community split between Angular 1 and 2. Today, there are 236,472 repo's associated with React compared 247,335 for both angular variants. Alone, interest in react is about to supercede both variants of Angular combined.
I believe the same thing will happen in the ether vs bitcoin competition. As bitcoin's split looms near, ethereum will reign supreme.