I was wondering, why (or why not) do you think that Bitcoin is better than Ethereum?
Ethereum seems to provide everything that Bitcoin offers but it has a huge advantage: smart contracts.
Smart contracts are small "programs" that live on the blockchain, so you can use them to build actual services and applications, while Bitcoin is useful only as a digital currency.
So why do you prefer Bitcoin if Ethereum seems superior?
Or maybe I'm missing something that makes Bitcoin actually better than Ethereum in some way?
The thing about Ethereum is that it doesn't actually provide anything that Bitcoin offers, let alone everything. Bitcoin is entirely unique in the crypto world. Bitcoin was built to be a decentralized, censorship resistant, globally secure form of sound digital money. Which of those things does Ethereum do? None of them.
It is really more accurate to split cryptocurrencies up into two separate categories: there's Bitcoin and then there is crypto which is everything else. Bitcoin is unique.
Ether is a token for an app network. It has great value, but it is entirely different than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is global sound money. Just as Bitcoin doesn't have a Turing complete language for making smart contracts so it can't do all the stuff Ethereum does, Ethereum doesn't have ANY of the qualities that make Bitcoin good at what it does. They are just entirely different things. Most people, even those in crypto, don't understand this.
The common and misinformed understanding of crypto is they all do the same thing (they're all "cryptoCURRENCIES") so the one that has the most functionality must be the best. But that's missing the fact that no other crypto comes close to meeting the very high standards of money that Bitcoin achieves. The fact that other cryptos can be transferred around just like Bitcoin misses the point entirely. It's like saying rocks are better money than gold coins because you can still pass them around as money but they also have all these other advantages like the ability to crush things and sharpen things and shaped into spearheads. Two entirely different things that aren't good at what the other one does, even though you can technically trade rocks like money.
Ethereum is good at being a less-centralized-than-web2.0 app network that runs open finance applications.
Bitcoin is good at being the best money humanity has ever had.
Neither one is good at doing what the other one does.
But Bitcoin has zero competition in the crypto world, really its main competition now is the US Dollar and Gold. Whereas Ethereum has many rising competitors in the crypto space. And I'd say the value space for THE global currency and global store of value is larger than the value space for one of many (even if Eth remains the dominant one) open finance app networks.