What do you mean it is a free platform? How is Bitcoin any different? Ethereum is not free. There are fees to send it around. Electrical and equipment costs are involved to keep it running 24/7. Just like Bitcoin.
Ethereum might very well exceed Bitcoin's market cap one day.
If Bitcoin is Digital Gold then Ethereum could be seen as Digital Oil.
I am not getting into Bitcoin right now because I don't like the price entry point and the exchange rate with Ethereum. It needs to improve before I become interested in it.
Per Coinranking.com:
In the past year Ethereum's MC is up 613.17%
In the past year Bitcoin's MC is up 290.42%
5 years ago Ethereum was $3.76
5 years ago Bitcoin was $375.32
Ethereum's 5 year gain as of today:
$1,588 / $3.76 = 422 times or 42,234 %
Bitcoin's 5 year gain as of today:
$38,230 / $ 375.32 = 101.85 times or 10,185 %
So in the past 5 years Ethereum's price has increased 4 times more than Bitcoin.
If you invested $10,000 in Bitcoin 5 years ago you would now have $1,018,500
If you invested $10,000 in Ethereum 5 years ago you would now have $4,220,000
That's a 5 year history. Go look at the charts for yourself. And this is based on current prices and not factoring in Ethereum's recent ATH of about $1,760.
Eth is not limited in supply. And for it to succeed it needs to be abundant. Eth facilitates transactions. Its a protocol, not a store of value (or at least was not intended as being one).
"If Bitcoin is Digital Gold then Ethereum could be seen as Digital Oil" - yes true, although that "oil" may be come as abundant as air - indeed it has to for Eth is to ever be broadly adopted. Indeed this was Vatalik's vision. He wanted to solve a problem, not have the eth be used as a speculative commodity. And if there is any significant cost involved, it inherently defeats the entire purpose of Eth, (and then alternatives will of course be used, driving costs of any such functionality down to basically zero).
As for "relative performance", the stats you have posted are correct, although basically nonsense if intended to show that eth might be a good future investment. I can create an alt in minutes with a market cap of .$0001, sell it to another person for $100. That would show "amazing growth", such growth neither would indicate any inherent value or utility of either the coin itself, or any long term future pricing. I can also point to a host of "alts" that have outperformed BTC, most no-one has every heard of and/or which will fade away in the future).
The lower the market cap, the easier it is to show "growth'. But make no doubts it - BTC is the core store of value. Speculative money will flow back and forth from BTC and various alts, but overall all this money in the crypto ecosystem will revert to BTC as the base value.
