From the perspective of income-generating assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum

On November 19, Dan Bin's recent public speech was released online.

In this speech, Dan Bin specifically mentioned gold, Bitcoin, and Tesla.

Regarding gold, Dan Bin mentioned (in essence):

From a long historical perspective, gold, as a non-yielding asset, cannot outperform yielding assets (like stocks), and he compared the return curves of the two with a time-return chart.

Upon hearing this, I was reminded of a statement by Buffett in his shareholder Q&A (in essence):

He used a famous European painting as an example, mentioning that if an investor bought this painting in 19XX and held it until today, what would its price be; meanwhile, another investor invested the same amount in the U.S. stock index fund at that time, and what would that fund be worth today. In comparison, the latter's return was far higher than the former's.

Thus, Buffett's conclusion is also: from an investment perspective, for non-yielding assets, their long-term investment return cannot match that of yielding assets.

This conclusion is similarly applied by the old gentleman to gold.

Next, Dan Bin mentioned Bitcoin and Tesla, and his subsequent point triggered me to summarize and review some previous viewpoints.

His viewpoint (in essence) is:

Even if Bitcoin could rise to $1 million in the future, he believes that compared to Tesla, the latter can bring greater value and potential. Therefore, in the long run, the return of the latter will be higher than that of the former.

His logical starting point is also: Bitcoin does not yield, while Tesla does yield and can generate significant returns.

One point of his viewpoint, in my opinion, may spark controversy: that is whether Tesla can truly realize Musk's vision and bring to fruition the business scenarios he envisions.

However, I believe this point of contention is not important; it is not the core of this comparison.

The core of this comparison is that the future upside potential of Bitcoin, as a non-yielding asset, is limited, and it cannot compare to yielding assets—this has stimulated me to reflect on and summarize some past viewpoints.

On the point that Bitcoin, as a non-yielding asset, cannot match the investment returns of yielding assets, I am increasingly in agreement with some traditional investors, including Dan Bin.

But I differ from them, the biggest difference being:

When they try to find a yielding asset with greater upside potential than Bitcoin, their primary and seemingly only target is traditional stocks.

I, however, primarily target assets within the crypto ecosystem (of course, I also pay attention to traditional stocks).

In an article written a long time ago (around 2022 or 2023?), I first shared a viewpoint:

I believe that Ethereum's market capitalization will surpass Bitcoin's in the future, primarily because Ethereum, as an application platform, can generate sustainable and healthy (transaction fee) revenue and can return this revenue to token holders through burning.

However, at that time, this viewpoint lacked some data and technical support, with key issues being:

(At that time) Ethereum's throughput was still too small; how could its performance support a large application ecosystem?

(With the technology architecture at that time) When Ethereum's price was too high, even if a large number of applications could run on it, such high transaction fees would certainly hinder the promotion of applications. In this case, how could a large application ecosystem be established?

(With the technology architecture at that time) If Ethereum's performance was simply enhanced, would it severely compromise decentralization? If decentralization is to be maintained, how can Ethereum's performance be improved?

Looking back at these key issues now, it can be said that after years of effort, especially the accelerated efforts of Ethereum's core development team this year, these issues have basically found relatively mature and practical solutions:

Based on Layer 2 scaling, zero-knowledge proofs, and EIL solutions, Ethereum's future can significantly enhance the performance of the entire ecosystem (L1+L2) while continuing to reduce application layer costs at a lower cost while maintaining decentralization:

• Transaction fees will no longer be an obstacle to application promotion;

• A large ecosystem can continue to expand based on improved performance and reduced costs;

• Decentralization will not be compromised due to performance improvements.

Combining Ethereum's current development status with the viewpoints mentioned by Dan Bin in this speech that I agree with,

• I now believe even more that Ethereum's market capitalization will surpass Bitcoin's in the future;

• And I believe that in the future, among public chains that can support smart contracts, Ethereum is very likely to generate greater investment returns than Bitcoin.