Bitcoin vs HEX
It can be difficult to 1:1 compare these two incredible cryptocurrencies, as one encompasses a network and coin with all kinds of intricacies and another is a revolution in DeFi that runs as a smart contract on the Ethereum and PulseChain networks. However, we can still try and look at them objectively, start with your preference and take sides or at least compare and contrast to see if you’re getting what you want as a user of the system.
Bitcoin is the blue chip, it has the most users, has been around the longest and the longer something is around, the more likely it is to stay around and has the most liquidity, name recognition and institutional adoption. But Bitcoin is also 4 times older than HEX and if HEX was designed to appreciate even more than Bitcoin, you might could yourself lucky to have come across it now instead of a decade from now after the exponential growth opportunities are fewer.
If you want a store of value, Bitcoin does that pretty well: the price goes up and down, but over time, has proven to go up even further with each cycle. Same with HEX. You want to spend them? Bitcoin has lightning to increase speed and lower transaction costs and HEX can easily be sent to any other address over the PulseChain network, as soon as it launches, for pennies. These are just a few of the similarities, which at the technical level would take much more detail and nuance to explain, none of which the average user cares about.
So what do they care about? What do you care about? Would you prefer the best technology that appreciates at an ever-more steady rate over time? Biggest brand and network? Bitcoin might be for you. Or do you prefer amazing game theory, slick and fun staking portal and price appreciation that mimics that of what early Bitcoin adopters have seen? HEX is known to have done a 10,000x according to some charts and estimates, numbers unheard of in traditional finance or even other top cryptos these days, giving you the opportunity to use volatility to your benefit, maximizing the chances to buy bottoms and sell tops. How about you choice to earn high, trustless interest over a time period of as little as a day to as much as 15 years, teaching you the keys to so many other things in life: compound interest and delayed gratification? What about a community that supports medical research, saving people’s lives and building even more cool products on top of HEX? That’s just a taste of what HEX has been doing for almost 3 years now.
Let’s break things down even further, grouping these differences by topic and making the case for HEX.
Security
HEX, or any well audited smart contract with little attack surface, could be said to more resistant to many attacks than the Ethereum code itself— so if Ethereum is as least as secure as Bitcoin, as we can see that neither have actually been hacked before, else billions of dollars would be lost and crypto space would have folded early, you could make a case that it’s more likely there would be bugs, that may or may not have security impact, in Bitcoin or Ethereum code than a well audited smart contract like HEX
The HEX smart contract code is locked and cannot be changed, unless there’s a fork and consensus in the community is that the forked coin / new contract is the better one, which is a very rare event— Bitcoin code changes from time to time, and when it does, there’s always a possibility of bugs
Regulation and risk of banning in many countries around the world keeps threatening POW networks like Bitcoin, where HEX runs on Ethereum which is switching to POS and PulseChain which at launch will be POS only— you can also think of HEX as “Proof of Wait” which is many fold more environmentally friendly than “Proof of Work”
Features
HEX is built for staking and earning a very competitive yield trustlessly, no middleman or company to give your keys to, but if you lock up your Bitcoin, you have to trust somebody with your coins and earn very little interest
You don’t have to buy mining hardware or pay for cloud mining to make more HEX, all you need to do it buy it and lock it up for any period of time to get more of it— it rewards people who not just invest early, but stop trading and just wait, go live their lives, worry less and continue creating value for the world while they automatically earn yield
Bitcoin doesn’t change much, it gets improvements here and there, but you can basically buy it, sell it, send and receive it— you can do all those things with HEX, plus you can stake it, as much as you want and for as long as you want up to 15 years and earn yield that’s paid to you by the smart contract, not a company or custodian
There’s an opportunity to double your HEX when new forked networks come online, such as PulseChain, which many predict the coins there will be worth even more than some of the ones on the original chain— the last significant Bitcoin fork was Bitcoin Cash, which may have technical merits, but hasn’t quite caught on which is reflected in the price
Usability
HEX to this day hasn’t had any downtime, and stays up as long as the network it’s running on is up, with Ethereum having perhaps no officially reported downtime since launch, whereas Bitcoin has went down twice in the past, once in 2010 and another time in 2013, not to mention the inflation bugs it’s had in the past
HEX on the PulseChain network will be nearly free to transact on at least for the first few months with blazing fast transaction completion times, but the average price of a Bitcoin transaction costs around $2 - $5
You can trade HEX natively on a DEX, no AML/KYC and you’d have to use wrapped BTC to do that, so more likely going to use a centralized exchange to trade Bitcoin
Trust
Respectfully, Bitcoin’s founder is anonymous and owns 5% of the supply— HEX’s founder makes frequent online and in-person appearances, speeches and updates, and while he likely owns a significant percentage of the supply as well, he was already rich and retired and is completely in it for glory, achieved by making a huge impact on the world and people in many ways which is why he is completely aligned with the success and complete dominance of his products in the crypto space
Richard Heart has debated any and every person who will challenge his ideas for HEX or PulseChain, from lawyers to Bitcoin maximalists to famous people across industries and has came out on top every single time— just flip through some of his top videos and see for yourself
Community
HEX was available to claim for free to Bitcoin holders when it was launched
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of HEX and Pulse streamers who have been spending their time, energy and their own money for years to share knowledge about a product that they love and want to help everyone else also enjoy and use to as a tool for financial freedom
Price Performance
It took Bitcoin about 12 years to go from an estimated $0.0008 to an ATH of $68,000 *
HEX was trading at around $0.0003 it’s first week on the market and in under 2 years made an ATH of around $0.54 *
Note: these are rough numbers in a sea of various reports and historical differences from sources on the internet, so they are meant to show a compelling story rather than quoted or stated as unequivocally correct. Also, one could look at the starting trade value vs measuring from the bottom to the top, wicks low and wicks high and so on to get different numbers, but the takeaway is the same.
So that’s a 85,000,000x from the first trading day in 2009 for Bitcoin to it’s ATH in 2021, so that gives you an idea of what kind of incredible returns you can have by getting in the ground floor of new cryptocurrency assets. HEX was designed to perform even better than Bitcoin and do it even faster.
By looking at data from market sources such as HexDailyStats and CoinMetrics, HEX went up conservatively around 8,000x (or 10,000x from wicks) from it’s ATL of $0.00006 to a daily average ATH of $0.48 (or $0.54+). Bitcoin was already $7,300 and hit a low of $5,300 after HEX launched in late 2019, so it has only went up around 12x to it’s ATH. So if you would have bought HEX on the first week of trading or at it’s bottom you could have made thousands of X gains, but if you would have bought and held Bitcoin in that same time period you might have gotten a 10x.
If you look at the charts, HEX is doing what Bitcoin has done, going through the cycles, going up higher after dips and making new ATHs only faster and on compressed time scale. People are locking up their coins to earn interest for 10-15 years at a time, which helps support the price by reducing sell pressure. It’s price performance has been, should continue to be superior and comparing it to how much Bitcoin has appreciated, HEX is no where near maxing out it’s potential gains.
Honorable Mentions
Bitcoin has negative externalities like POW mining that seems like its never going away, where HEX on PulseChain will be POS and much better for the environment. Also, the Mt. Gox coins are just waiting to be dumped. What if Satoshi comes back one day and dumps all of his coins? What kind of chaos would be created in the community if Bitcoin forks Satoshi’s coins out? There’s no easy button to make it go away. HEX is pre-viral, massively gatekept by the Coinmarketcap ranking website and both loved and labeled negatively by so many that don’t understand it and it’s value proposition, yet the number of wallets holding HEX increases every day. It was best to buy Bitcoin in it’s early days, when nobody thought it was going to succeed, it was hard to buy and little liquidity and the price was much lower. HEX is still cheap when compared to Bitcoin using many different metrics.
So if you want to invest in what everybody else is investing in, buy Bitcoin and hold onto it, it will probably keep going up, less and less each year but still up and to the right. It's solid. However, if you want in early, you want to be a part of the maximum appreciation cycle and earn interest from you investment trustlessly in an asset that is more decorrelated than most in the crypto market, you want HEX. Do you want to invest in my something that can make you rich? Bitcoin can't do that anymore, it's not 2015. It's 2022 and HEX wins.
Most of this analysis was derived from or was inspired by listening to hundreds of hours of RH streams, podcasts, books and debates such as the one with Bitcoin Magazine. Watch it and see what you can learn and decide the winning ideas for yourself. If you care the most about price appreciation and using a cool product that incentivizes healthy behavior, the Richard Heart ecosystem is for you.
