BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen has sparked a Twitter feud with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin after posting a thread of negative tweets criticising Buterin’s thoughts on scalability, sharding, code obfuscation, and the proof-of-stake consensus.
BitTorrent is one of the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols ever made and was acquired by blockchain protocol Tron last year, with Cohen then moving on to his own project – the Chia Network.
Last Friday, Buterin posted a lengthy blog post to his personal website, entitled “Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later”, where he laid out some of the most difficult challenges cryptocurrency researchers have faced ranked according to how much work had been done on them.
However, Cohen disagreed with Buterin’s view of the industry, calling much of his analysis “wrong-headed” and launching a lengthy thread calling out problems in Buterin’s post.
Addressing Buterin’s thoughts on scalability and sharding, Cohen said:
For 'Blockchain Scalability' he talks about on-chain scaling with sharding as the only option. Of course it isn't the only option, payment channel networks are much more appealing in many ways and are becoming a real thing.
— Bram Cohen🌱 (@bramcohen) November 25, 2019
Instead, Cohen claims that Ethereum’s approach to sharding doesn’t significantly improve scalability but does compromise on security and erodes the original role of a full node on the network.
Cohen also called out the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which he believes causes unnecessary security flaws.
Proof of stake continues to be a bad idea. It starts with a fundamentally weakened security model and runs into a whole host of deep technical issues on top of that. Progress has been made, but it's more about making decent BFT than real proof of stake.
— Bram Cohen🌱 (@bramcohen) November 25, 2019
Buterin provided responses to some of Cohen’s claims, replying to Cohen’s criticism of sharding by asserting that the Ethereum protocol is designed to minimise economies of scale:
Why? The protocol is being designed explicitly to minimize economies of scale from running a pool in multiple ways…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 25, 2019
Cohen also likened Buterin’s blockchain economics, and his proposals on how to manage open source protocols, to tech giants such as Facebook and Google, remarking that the governance Buterin proposed was like something “out of the dark ages”.
ongoing operations include the development and maintenance of open source software. Such obscure and esoteric examples as Redhat, IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have been known to do this in significant amounts, maybe you've heard of them?
— Bram Cohen🌱 (@bramcohen) November 25, 2019
Instead, Cohen argued that working on governance at all was a “step backward”, as Satoshi Nakamoto’s consensus detailed in the original Bitcoin whitepaper was an effort to avoid human governance.
More criticism for Ethereum’s young founder
Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, also chimed in to put down Buterin. Back scathingly remarked that looking to Vitalik Buterin for advice about blockchain was like looking to Elizabeth Holmes, founder of now-defunct blood-testing company Theranos, for advice about the state of biotech.
it's like looking to elizabeth holmes for the state of biotech. what'd you expect.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) November 25, 2019
Buterin neglected to provide detailed responses to all of Cohen’s criticisms, instead choosing to focus on how he had been “personally insulted” by two separate blockchain personalities in the last day.
I got insulted by *two* major cryptocurrency figures today! People say fun things about me all the time, but I do think this is a bit of a record.https://t.co/pas4jLkPLkhttps://t.co/xw6fXXIla4
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 26, 2019
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