Definitely not.
Both achieve the effect of scale, but to be frank this is much, much better. Once segwit and lightning kick in, I anticipate some issues in the world of bitcoin, specifically because they more or less move some transactions off of the blockchain. @dantheman's solution does not propose such madness.
OK cool. I am also wondering if we could take some of the ethereum thunder with regards to "smart contracts" too. We have the speed and scaling - which they have not yet fixed and from what I am reading there seems to be a loss of confidence in their blockchain overall. I'm not being mean to ethereum but it seems there is an opportunity there right now.
I must toss out an alternate view.
I've been a critic of steem-- but I hope, a "known friendly" critic. I say this because I now feel compelled to compare to ethereum. AFAIK, ethereum, and thus "ether" the "gas" that pays for transactions.... both do a grand total of nothing at all. Really.
So here's my reply on that: I do not think that we want any of that thunder. For more on some pretty awesome stuff, have a look into these things, comparatively:
From my limited (but-limited-knowledge-puts-me-in the top 1% of programmers for comparative blockchain knowledge and top .001% of humans for the same) knowledge, I want to say that there are way better things on the horizon. G, TM, and HL all share some common points. There's an incredible discussion occurring here:
https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos/issues/43