From Flippening to Floppening: Bitcoin Regains Market Dominance

Hopes for the Flippening at bay

The massive and record-breaking ICOs of June/July have revealed serious weaknesses in the Ethereum network, causing many to question how much “better” it really is than Bitcoin.

During its token sale, the strong hype around Bancor led to a significant increase in pending transactions, as buyers attempted to acquire BNTs. Consequently, the whole Ethereum network was impacted for many hours from such a rush.

Pending transactions end up in a dedicated memory space on the network’s nodes, which is more commonly called “backlog.” When this space is saturated, transactions take greater amounts of time to be validated that can go up to hours, as the Bancor case showed.

Regarding congestion, however, it is the Status token sale that created the most on Ethereum. The ICO registered the highest ever number of daily transactions on the network: 308,488.

As a result, the Ethereum network got clogged up and started slowing down significantly. This network paralysis was so strong that many exchange platforms temporarily blocked ETH withdrawals. MyEtherWallet, one of the most popular ETH wallets, even displayed a note discouraging users to send ETH if their transaction was not urgent.

These recent network congestions reveal that Ethereum is suffering from currency-specific challenges, which put hopes for the Flippening at bay. The BTC/ETH currency pair has now moved in favor of Bitcoin, but the future remains uncertain as we move towards major upgrades for both cryptocurrencies.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/from-flippening-to-floppening-bitcoin-regains-market-dominance