Vitalik Buterin responds to the criticisms of Ethereum (ETH) by Tuur Demeester

Saturday (29 December 2018), a day after the encryption analyst Tuur Demeester, managing editor of Adamant Research and founder of the Bitcoin alfa Adamant Capital fund, took Twitter to launch a long tweet 50 tweestorm who attacked Ethereum (ETH), the talented Canadian-Canadian computer programmer Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, went to Reddit to address these criticisms point by point.

Vitalik's rebuttal on Reddit came in the form of an answer to the "discussion thread on the critique of Tuur" on subreddit "/ ethereum". In this article, we focus on the most interesting comments from Vitalik.

Tuur: "Firstly, the architecture and culture of ETH is the opposite of that of Bitcoin, yet it claims to offer the same solutions: decentralization, immutability, SoV, issue of activities, smart contracts, …"

Vitalik: "I agree, I personally find the culture of Ethereum much healthier, even if I'm a little bit of part :)"

Tuur: "I'm in agreement with the developer of Ethereum Vlad Zamfir that it's not money, it's not safe and it's not scalable."

Vitalik: "I'm pretty sure that Vlad would say exactly the same thing about Bitcoin"

Tuur: "For me the first red flag came out when in our weekly hangout we asked the founders of Eth to know how they would scale the network. (We are now 4.5 years away, and the sharding is still a unrealizable dream.) "

Vitalik: "The basic principles have been known for years, the core design for almost a year, the details for months, with the implementations coming, so the sharding is absolutely not at the height of the dream stage at this point."

Tuur: "Recently, a team of reputable developers has decided to review the long-awaited white book Casper / Sharding, concluding that it is not at the height of its own affirmations".

Vitalik: "That review was out of place in many ways, for example to see https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1071111404340604929and from the way CBC is not even a prerequisite for Serenity "

Tuur"On the second level front, developers are now attempting to scale Ethereum via scale through the status channels (Lightning version of ETH), but it is not clear whether ERC20 tokens in the main chain will be transferable to this environment. "

Vitalik: "Umm … you can definitely use Raiden with arbitrary ERC20, that's why the interface currently uses WETH (the version of the ether with ERC20) and not ETH"

Tuur: "Bitcoin & # 39; s Lightning Network is now available and is growing at a rapid pace".

Vitalik: "Of course, although as far as I understand it is still a low probability of finding routes for non-trivial amounts, and there are the capital lockup vectors, and privacy issues …. FWIW Personally I do not have never thought that the lightning is impractical, it is just a design that intrinsically comes across ten thousand small problems that will probably take a long time to go further ".

Tuur: "For those who do not know, here's a good review that highlights some of the fundamental proof-of-stake design issues. As I said, this is the territory of scientific experiments." Medium.com/@hugonguyen/pr .. . "

Vitalik: "And here is a series of long discussions on my part about why the game test is OK: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ. philosophical, see https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-506585978d51 "

Tuur"Over the years, this has become a model in the culture of Ethereum: recycling old ideas without correctly referring to past research and having peer review standards, this is not the way science progresses."

Vitalik: "I try to give people credit whenever I can, half of my blog posts and ethresear.ch have a" special thanks "section right at the top, sometimes we end up reinventing things and sometimes we get to talk about things, forgetting it, and then re-inventing it, it is self-taught life and if you feel unfairly it has not been accredited for something, always feel free to comment, people have done it and I have modified it ".

Tuur: "My third point concerns the promise of PoE of perpetual income to ETHIZENS.Vitalik is no stranger to embrace free lunch ideas, for example during his ETH 2014 announcement speech, where he described a currency with an inflation tax 20% as "no cost" to users. "

Vitalik: "Yes, I have not really emphasized the perpetual income for stakers as a point of sale in years, but I actually prefer the prizes to be as low as possible while being high enough for safety."

Tuur: "Another huge problem that Ethereum has is the downsizing: putting" all on the blockchain "(which stores everything forever) and doubling" the computer of the world ", we will end up with a very slow and clogged system."

Vitalik: "We never claimed to put it all on the blockchain." The phrase "computer computer" was never meant to be interpreted as a personal desktop of all & # 39; , but rather as a common platform specific to the parts of applications that require consensus on sharing As evidence of this, note how Whisper and Swarm were part of the vision as an addition to Ethereum from the very beginning. "

Tuur: "Now the etereum swells is so serious that practically an individual knot is practically impossible for a layman …"

Vitalik: "Umm …. I just made a knot from scratch last week on a consumer laptop".

Tuur: "Another empty statement: in 2016, Ethereum was promoted as resistant to censorship …"

Vitalik: "Yes, the DAO fork has violated the notion of absolute immutability, however, the" forking the DAO will lead to doom and gloom "the crowd got it wrong in a fundamental way: it did not work like a precedent that justifies all kinds of further state intervention The community has clearly drawn a line in the sand firmly rejecting EIP 867, and the EIP 999 now seems not to go anywhere, so it seems there is some evidence that the social contract of immutability moderate but not infinitely strong – it can actually be stable. "

Tuur: "Other potential signs of centralization: Vitalik Buterin signs an agreement with a Russian governmental institution and ETH core developers experimenting with semi-closed meetings"

Vitalik: "Suppose tomorrow I should register to work directly for Kim Jong Un. What would happen to the Ethereum protocol in practice? I suspect very little, I am mainly involved in the Serenity job, and the other researchers have proved very capable of both pushing the specifications forward too without me and I do not want to make mistakes in my work, so I do not think that any arguments are applied to me and we ended up deciding not to do semi-closed meetings anymore ".

Tuur: "Another red flag for me is the obvious lack of relevant skills in the ETH development community."

Vitalik: "Personally, I am confident in the talents of our basic researchers and our community of academic partners, most recently this last group includes people from Starkware, Stanford CBR, IC3 and other groups."

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