If you think Ether is competing with Bitcoin for merchant transactions you don't understand what Ethereum is offering. Ether tokens represent computing power on Ethereum's blockchain platform, it's not a monetary currency to buy goods and services. (The Ethereum folks mention this on their website). The "market observers" who coined the word "the Flippening" are confusing too many people. This isn't about Ether replacing Bitcoin. It's about the investment value of bitcoin the currency and ether the computing power token. It's frustrating that so many people are confusing this key detail.
From a Coindesk article on the FLippening "branded 'The Flippening' by market observers, this new hypothetical is defined loosely as the point at which a competing blockchain network could replace bitcoin as the largest and best capitalized blockchain." (
http://www.coindesk.com/flippening-will-ether-pass-bitcoin-will-mean/)
This "guess the date" question is like guessing when the market cap of Google exceeded the market cap of the Euro.
The only similarity is that since the crypto market is so small some money that was invested in Bitcoin is likely being sold to invest in Ethereum....not as a currency but because the price per token is sky rocketing.
This reply looks very interesting and reasonable at the same time. It would be really great to see the OP's reply to this.
I was always thinking that Ethereum is a good investment but I never thought that you can't buy goods with ETH. Is that true? I thought theoretically we can buy goods with any coin.
Whether or not you can 'buy goods' with ETH isn't so interesting. You merely need a counterparty who agrees. It reminds me of the Lamborghini dealer who sells cars for bitcoin - who the fuck cares?! That isn't an indicator that bitcoin is powerful and becoming widely accepted, it just means some Lamborghini dealer will handle the conversion to fiat on his end. Yet the community takes this a 'proof' of bitcoin's versatility. Not all in the Bitcoin community are so sharp.
Ethereum is a platform that will support many, many remarkable types of transactions and relationships between parties and especially where those relationships include transfer of value. Bitcoin is similar, but the general purpose platform is very seriously limited. Bitcoin has been devised to support the primary application: currency. Ethereum will have many application and certainly does support the 'currency' application. But nobody in the Ethereum project really cares about the currency application because there is so much important stuff to work on for now. currency and merchant adoption are very low on the importance list. They will come later. For now, the whole team is building the engine room. Silly apps are of much concern until later.
But the big thing to pay attention to is this: 1) Ethereum is being worked very seriously, everyday, by thousands of smart people in many companies, i.e. even Microsoft. Conversely, Bitcoin 'leaders' are fighting like little schoolgirls as Adam Back tries to push Bitcoin into a corner for monopolization of transactions on his Lightning Network. Bitcoin has made zero technical progress in 3 years. 2) Ethereum functionality is HUGE when compared to Bitcoin functionality. Even if Bitcoin decided to liberalize the scripting - it will be a silly joke compared to Ethereum. Bitcoin hasn't liberalized scripting. The opposite. Bitcoin hasn't even changed the limit from 1MB to ?MB. The smallest imaginable change. This tiny technical change produced a three year fight with still no solution. Technical advance cannot happen in the 'consensus' scheme. For that reason, Ethereum has remarkable advance and Bitcoin is forever stuck precisely where it was 3 years ago.
If you are not very good at thinking and you don't understand what I just wrote, then consider this: If you hodl your bitcoin, you will lose a shitload of value as ETH continues to rise like crazy for the next year or two. Probably even longer.