How is ether (ETH) different from bitcoinBitcoin is a digital currency (also called crypto-currency) ... More (BTC)?
When launching the sale of Ethereum’s native cryptocurrencyA cryptocurrency (or crypto currency) is a digital asset des... More, ether (ETH), co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated, “Ether is a product, NOT a security or investment offering. Ether is simply a token useful for paying transaction fees or building or purchasing decentralized application services on the Ethereum platform…”
Ether (ETH), has many of the same features as bitcoin. One distinction, however, is the method in which miners are incentivized. Instead of transaction fees, Ethereum uses gas, which is a measure of computational power needed to complete a transaction. For larger transactions that take more power, an Ethereum user will have to pay more gas to miners and vice versa.
For blockBlocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed an... More size, Ethereum blocks are capped by the amount of gas each of them can store up. Ethereum is limited by 6.7 million gas limits on each block. The miners can only add transactions whose gas requirements add up to something which is equal to or less than the gas limit of the block. A typical one-on-one transaction eats up 21,000 units of gas.
Currently, ether is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, second to Bitcoin. However, unlike bitcoin, which has a hard cap of 21 million bitcoins, ether does not have a hard cap limit.