According to Bram Cohen, BitTorrent creator, Ethereum is unlikely to last long in the market. And the reason it all came from Ethereum Co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, shared a text under the title ‘Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later.’
In this document, Buterin details the various aspects, plans, and issues that may or have begun to affect the cryptocurrency industry, which has a profound influence on Ethereum.
However, Buterin does not seem to mind scalability, timestamping, Arbitrary Proof of Computation, Code Obfuscation, Hash-Based Cryptography, etc. But many people pay special attention to these features. And of course, including Bram Cohen.
Cohen criticized Vitalik Buterin with Ethereum
BitTorrent creator, Bram Cohen, strongly disagrees with Buterin’s argument on Twitter about the text mentioned above. He rejected most of the discussions. Moreover, according to him, some solutions are not even worth considering for many reasons. He called Buterin’s claims wrong-headed and began a 28-tweets-long thread in which he addressed Buterin’s allegations, point by point.
Here’s Vitalik’s opinions about the state of technology around cryptocurrencies. As you might expect, I think much of this is wrong-headed, and will explain (thread) https://t.co/m1FLSiiwo4
— Bram Cohen (@bramcohen) November 25, 2019
First, in terms of blockchain scalability, Buterin mentions on-chain scaling with sharding. However, Cohen completely disagrees because payment channel networks are a much better way to go about it, and are becoming ‘a real thing.’ And if we continue to do as Buterin stated, miners will need to Have all the shards. And that would not be sharding, but redefining what a ‘full node’ is. Regarding this detail, Buterin is not mentioned in the text. But that’s the result Cohen thinks is likely to happen if the technology behind the cryptocurrency goes into this path.
> essentially requiring miners to have all the shards
Huh?
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 25, 2019
The current proposals for sharding in Ethereum will degenerate into there only being a few servers which download everything and make all the blocks and everything else is a partial node
— Bram Cohen (@bramcohen) November 25, 2019
Later, Cohen went on to criticize Buterin’s concern about the ‘Arbitrary Proof of Computation.’ He said:
“A lot of very exciting stuff going on. However, I also emphasize that I don’t dare to take it seriously for at least a few more years. I put a lot of hope in this concept. Although I believe it will be less developed at this time. ”
Besides, there are quite a few points Buterin made that Cohen found unnecessary. Code Obfuscation is one such segment, where the Ethereum Co-Founder hopes for further progress while Cohen believes that ZK techniques already fulfill pretty much all use cases in practice.
Ethereum’s Proof of Stake is a bad idea
Finally, Cohen argues that Ethereum is unlikely to last long if it continues to implement Proof of Stake. And the PoS protocol is a bad idea.
Cohen said:
“It is a fundamentally weakened security model that will cause countless additional technical issues. There was some progress in the field, but I still don’t seem to have much faith in it.”
Cohen also commented on timestamping. To Cohen, it is fine as it is and that there is no need to bring additional changes.
it’s like looking to elizabeth holmes for the state of biotech. what’d you expect.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) November 25, 2019
Blockstream CEO, Adam Back, also decided to weigh in on Cohen’s tweetstorm against Vitalik, judging the Ethereum Co-Founder to the disgraced Founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes.
Read more:
- Vitalik Buterin Shared About New Ethereum Updates
- Istanbul To Berlin: Ethereum Milestones On The Serenity Road