A Comparative Analysis of Blockchain Platforms – Bitcoin and Ethereum

The 21
^st
century is all about modernization and accepting new technologies. The Blockchain Technology is a prominent and reliable technology that is getting into almost every industry today. After it was first initiated in 2008, it has tremendously gained traction. Within a short span of 10 years, it is commendable that it has grown massively and has been easily accepted worldwide. Though the first application of this technology is cryptocurrency, blockchain technology has transcended to support more applications as well. Developers have been smart enough to study the underlying protocol and customize it according to their own requirements. Today, blockchain offers multiple functionalities like decentralization, security, transparency and democracy.Two such giants which are most popular in the blockchain world are - Bitcoin and Ethereum. The elemental difference between these two platforms of the blockchain technology is the purpose for which they have been created. In this paper, the underlying differences between these two blockchain platforms will be overviewed. Both these applications are cryptocurrencies, but the focus in this paper would be on the comparison of the the underlying concepts and their protocols. The objective of both platforms, the differences in their architectures and the consensus or agreement mechanism used between the participants would be summarized along with the scalability factors and limitations. This paper will provide a brief overview of both these platforms and a clear idea about their use in the industry today.