The majority of the serious innovation and development in the crypto space currently happens on Ethereum, which keeps the money people interested and sniffing around. The existence of Ethereum IMO helps the price of bitcoin increase, especially as ever more bitcoin is "wrapped" and ported to the ETH network.[0]
I think this article is really solid, as are all of her articles. Part of what I love about Ethereum and altcoins is exactly because of the speculative, fast-money, insanely risky and exotic assets and protocols it creates. Where she sees that as a negative, I see it as a positive. ETH and its tokens have helped my crypto friends amass more wealth than we would have made working at FAANG companies, and without slogging through all of the bullshit and pain of working at huge corporations. Plus we get to work on super interesting tech rather than middleware that powers the middleware that powers the data mining pipeline that extracts money out privacy violations.
If you want the "safe" crypto play, I tell people to do 60/40 BTC/ETH on Coinbase so they can hold it safely and never look at it again. If you want to make the 10x fast money gains speculating like a crypto degen trader, then the only game in town is ETH and the alts running on its ecosystem.
"Wrapped Bitcoin" is not "porting" BTC to Ethereum. It's merely a token that represents some sort of claim on actual BTC held with a single custodian (Bitgo).
It's effectively porting BTC to Ethereum, given the value of the BTC can be utilized on Ethereum by the tokenized claim on BTC.
And there are wrapped BTC tokens on Ethereum that utilize cryptoeconomic incentives instead of the reputation of a custodian to guarantee redeemability for BTC: renBTC and tBTC.
WBTC was just the first to launch so has the largest market cap. It's also possible that WBTC's reliance on a trusted third party is perceived as less risky than reliance on novel cryptoeconomic incentive schemes.
I think this article is really solid, as are all of her articles. Part of what I love about Ethereum and altcoins is exactly because of the speculative, fast-money, insanely risky and exotic assets and protocols it creates. Where she sees that as a negative, I see it as a positive. ETH and its tokens have helped my crypto friends amass more wealth than we would have made working at FAANG companies, and without slogging through all of the bullshit and pain of working at huge corporations. Plus we get to work on super interesting tech rather than middleware that powers the middleware that powers the data mining pipeline that extracts money out privacy violations.
If you want the "safe" crypto play, I tell people to do 60/40 BTC/ETH on Coinbase so they can hold it safely and never look at it again. If you want to make the 10x fast money gains speculating like a crypto degen trader, then the only game in town is ETH and the alts running on its ecosystem.
[0] https://wbtc.network/