Crypto Currency

What is the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum?

It has been a very exciting year for Cryptocurrency with the market value of most major Cryptos increasing dramatically over…

Published 8 years ago in
What is the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum?

It has been a very exciting year for Cryptocurrency with the market value of most major Cryptos increasing dramatically over the past 12 months. Investors saw the increasing adoption of Cryptocurrency as a payment method and decided to back its potential.

In addition to inflows of capital from investors keen to hold Cryptocurrency, substantial resources were also invested in the technical development of various Cryptocurrencies.

The underlying infrastructure needed to support the wider adoption and use of Cryptocurrency also benefited from increased levels of innovation and development throughout the year.

In the midst of all this activity two Cryptocurrencies in particular have attracted a lot of attention; Bitcoin and Ethereum. This has been for a variety of reasons, but it has resulted in these two Cryptos being the most widely held ones at present.

But what is the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum? This article will take you on a short journey through the Crypto landscape to explain what these differences are.

 

Bitcoin

 

Bitcoin was the very the first Cryptocurrency. It was invented by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto and released as open-source software in 2009.

It operates on a peer-to-peer basis with transactions taking place between users directly, without an intermediary. Essentially people can send Bitcoins to each other directly thus transferring value to each other without having to go through a bank or other payment provider.

These transactions are verified by network nodes through the use of cryptography and recorded in a publicly available ledger known as a Blockchain.

 

What exactly is a Blockchain?

 

A Blockchain is a public record of all transactions in a particular system that have ever been executed. It cannot be tampered with or edited and is protected by cryptography.

A Blockchain thus stands as an unchangeable record of all transactions on a network, accessible to all participants. It is essentially a public record of all of the transaction which have taken place on a particular network, but it can also be much more.

 

Enter Ethereum!

 

Whilst Blockchain technology, in the beginning, was used as a method to simply record transactions between people using things like Bitcoin, it is now being developed further and used to support applications which are beyond just a digital currency like Bitcoin.

Ethereum is one of those advances. Launched in 2014, it is an open-ended decentralized software platform that enables smart contracts and Distributed Applications to be built and run. This is designed to happen without any downtime or interference from a third party by using Blockchain technology in a different way to Bitcoin.

Ethereum is not just a platform but also a programming language running on a blockchain. It is designed to help developers to build and publish distributed applications, not just transfer value between each other. It is far more than just another Cryptocurrency.

No one owns the Ethereum network itself, but the system runs it cannot be run for free. The network needs ‘ether’, a unique piece of code that can be used to pay for the computational resources needed to run an application or program. Ether is the token you see traded widely on Crypto exchanges.

The potential applications of Ethereum are wide-ranging and it is really only at the beginning of what could be a very exciting journey.

 

Difference Between Bitcoin and Ethereum?

 

While both Bitcoin and Ethereum are powered by the principle of a distributed ledger that is really where the major similarities end.

The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is their purpose. While Bitcoin is created as an alternative to regular money and is thus a method of payment and store of value, Ethereum is developed as a platform which facilitates peer-to-peer contracts and other software applications.

While Bitcoin and Ether, the token which runs on Ethereum, are both digital currencies, the primary purpose of Ether is not to be used to make payments but to assist developers in running distributed applications on the Ethereum platform.

 

Conclusion

 

As we have seen Bitcoin was designed to transfer value anonymously just like any other coin but Ethereum has much more advanced aims. It wants to be a platform which can be used to distribute other software applications and facilitate far more complex types of interaction than just the transfer for value.

Ethereum and its goals are more in line with the greater discussion around Blockchain based technology we can see today. Companies around the world see the Blockchain as something which can be used for much more than just value transfer.

It is certainly a very exciting time to be involved in this area. A public peer to peer ledger that cannot be tampered with offers up so many more possibilities than what it is being used for at present. Possibly far more than Satoshi Nakamoto could have envisaged all the way back in 2008.

 

More articles on cryptocurrency in our cryptocurrency section

 

 

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Crypto Currency

A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin

Tech Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin Most simplifies the complex process of quantum computing as “it can be 0 and 1 at the same time.” That is not an explanation for

Published 7 hours ago in
A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin
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A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin

Most simplifies the complex process of quantum computing as “it can be 0 and 1 at the same time.” That is not an explanation for why it threatens Bitcoin. This is.

By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Aoyon Ashraf
Updated Apr 6, 2026, 5:00 a.m. Published Apr 5, 2026, 8:03 p.m.
Make preferred on
(Misha Friedman/Getty Images)
(Misha Friedman/Getty Images)

What to know:

  • Google has published research suggesting a future quantum computer could theoretically derive a bitcoin private key from its public key in about nine minutes, threatening the security of Bitcoin and other cryptographic systems.
  • Unlike classical computers, which process bits as either 0 or 1, quantum computers use qubits that can exist in multiple states simultaneously and exploit phenomena like superposition and entanglement to explore many possibilities at once.
  • This fundamentally different form of computation could undermine the mathematical assumptions behind current encryption, raising urgent concerns about the safety of existing blockchain assets and digital security more broadly.

This week, Google published a paper describing how a quantum computer could theoretically derive a bitcoin private key in 9 minutes, with ramifications that stretch to Ethereum, other tokens, private banking, and potentially everything in the world.

Quantum computing is easy to mistake for a faster version of a regular computer. But it is not a more powerful chip or a bigger server farm. It is a fundamentally different kind of machine, different at the level of the atom itself.

A quantum computer starts with a very cold, very small loop of metal where particles begin to behave in ways they do not behave under normal conditions on Earth, ways that alter what we think of as the basic rules of physics.

Understanding what that means, physically, is the difference between reading about the quantum threat and actually grasping it.

How computers and quantum computers actually work

Regular computers store information as bits — each is either a 0 or a 1. A bit is a tiny switch. Physically, it’s a transistor on a “chip” — a microscopic gate that either lets electricity through (1) or doesn’t (0).

Every photo, every bitcoin transaction, every word you’ve ever typed is stored as patterns of these switches being on or off. There is nothing mysterious about a bit; it is a physical object in one of the two definite states.

Every calculation is just shuffling these 0s and 1s around really fast. A modern chip can do billions of these per second, but it still does them one at a time, in sequence.

Quantum computers use something known as qubits instead of bits. A qubit can be 0, 1, or — and this is the weird part — both at the same time!

This is possible as a qubit is a completely different kind of physical object. The most common version, and the one Google uses, is a tiny loop of superconducting metal cooled to about 0.015 degrees above absolute zero, colder than outer space but here on Earth.

At that temperature, electricity flows through the loop without any resistance, and the current is said to exist in a quantum state.

In the superconducting loop, current can flow clockwise (call that 0) or counterclockwise (call that 1). But at quantum scales, the current does not have to pick one direction and actually flows in both directions simultaneously.

Don’t mistake it for switching between the two really fast. The current is measurably, experimentally and verifiably in both states simultaneously.

(CoinDesk)

Mind-bending physics

With us so far? Great, because here’s where it gets genuinely strange, because the physics behind how it works isn’t immediately intuitive, and it is not supposed to be.

Everything someone interacts with in daily life obeys classical physics, which assumes that things are in one place at one time. But particles do not behave this way at the subatomic scale.

An electron does not have a definite position until you look at it. A photon does not have a definite polarization until you measure it. A current in a superconducting loop does not flow in a definite direction until you force it to pick.

The reason we don’t experience this in everyday life is decoherence. When a quantum system interacts with its environment, air molecules, heat, vibrations and light, the superposition collapses almost instantly.

A football cannot be in two places at once because it is interacting with trillions of air molecules, dust, sound, heat, gravity, etc., every nanosecond. But isolate a tiny current in a near-absolute-zero vacuum, shield it from every possible disturbance, and the quantum behavior survives long enough to compute with.

That’s why quantum computers are so hard to build. People are engineering physical environments where the laws of physics that normally prevent this stuff from happening are held at bay for just long enough to run a calculation.

Google’s machines operate in dilution refrigerators the size of huge rooms, colder than anything in the natural universe, surrounded by layers of shielding against electromagnetic noise, vibration, and thermal radiation.

And the qubits are fragile even then. They lose their quantum state constantly, which is why “error correction” dominates every conversation about scaling up.

So quantum computing is not a faster version of classical computing. It is exploiting a different set of physical laws that only apply at extremely small scales, extremely low temperatures, and extremely short timeframes.

(CoinDesk)

Now stack that up.

Two regular bits can be in one of four states (00, 01, 10, 11), but only one at a time (since current flows in only one direction). Two qubits can represent all four states at once, as the current is flowing in all directions at the same time.

Three qubits represent eight states. Ten qubits represent 1,024. Fifty qubits represent over a quadrillion. The number doubles with every qubit that is added, which is why the scaling is so exponential.

The second trick is something called entanglement. When two qubits are entangled, measuring one instantly tells an observer something about the other, no matter how far apart they are. This lets a quantum computer coordinate across all those simultaneous states in a way that regular parallel computing cannot.

And these quantum computers are set up so that wrong answers cancel each other out (like overlapping waves that flatten) and right answers reinforce each other (like waves that stack higher). By the end of the computation, the correct answer has the highest probability of being measured.

So it’s not brute-force speed. It’s a fundamentally different approach to calculation — one that lets nature explore an exponentially large space of possibilities and then collapses to the right answer through physics rather than logic.

A monumental threat to cryptography

This mind-bending physics is why it is terrifying for encryption.

The math protecting bitcoin relies on the assumption that checking every possible key would take longer than the age of the universe.

But a quantum computer doesn’t check every key. It explores all of them simultaneously and uses interference to surface the right one.

That is where it ties into Bitcoin. Going one direction, from private key to public key, takes milliseconds. Going the other direction, from public key back to private key, would take a classical computer a million years, or even longer than the age of the universe. That asymmetry is the only thing proving that a person is holding their coins.

(CoinDesk)

A quantum computer running an algorithm called Shor’s can go through that trapdoor in reverse. Google’s paper this week showed it could do so with far fewer resources than anyone previously estimated, and within a timeframe that races against bitcoin’s own block confirmations.

This is why the threat of quantum computers breaking blockchain encryption is genuinely making everyone very worried.

How that attack works step by step, what Google’s paper specifically changed, and what it means for the 6.9 million bitcoin already exposed, is the subject of the next piece in this series.

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