While Ethereum blows like the wind, hot air, big profits it is also seizing up under mere ICO token distribution contracts running.
Reasons why it is supposedly better
- Smart contracts - we have XCP and Rootstock layers with the same abilities tied to BTC
- Sharding/scaling - very complex ETH roadmap is years away - we have Segwit, fully tested and deployed in BTC clonecoin LTC
- Scarcity - its not even a thing in ETH, no plans for coin cap
As for Bitcoin scaling debate - its concensus now that we have Segwit - if not a possible extra blocksize increase later on. We will get to give Lightning network a chance to slowly take away weight of transactions via a schema of payment channels with ultra-tiny fees allowing micro-transactions, instant and ongoing per/second payment that closes when you want to finish renting services. Like Bitcoin which brings together cryptography, proof of work hashing/security, economic incentives and open source ongoing development we have Segwit bringing several amazing bits of computer science - types of innovative smart contracts that actually help improve Bitcoin.
BTC1 is the name for a node that would provide Segwit and possible bigger blocks sooner or later. It isn't sure if many pepole who are signalling intent with "NYA" in coinbase will actually run a new unproven node. We've seen the Bitcoin Unlimited crashing and the way many miners who were signally support for Bitcoin Unlimited were not actually running that software. That many nodes would crash when a bug was triggered but the hash rate wouldn't change much showing that these were more spam type nodes to get the numbers on the graph to reflect Bitcoin Unlimited support in a way that was deceptive.
Core and Core with Bip148 are both going to happily lock in Segwit. We will see signalling but it will take an activation to understand which software is being used for sure.