all about cryptop referances
On September 1, Vitalik Buterin conducted an interview with the economics writer Noah Smith and the co-founder of Ethereum talked an awful lot about Bitcoin and the network’s long-term security. Buterin also discussed the crypto economy’s crash, saying he was “surprised the crash didn’t happen sooner.”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently did an interview with the economics writer Noah Smith and Buterin had a lot to say about the current state of crypto. Smith first asked Buterin about his thoughts on the recent crypto crash, and Buterin said he thought it would have crashed sooner.
“I was surprised the crash didn’t happen earlier,” Buterin said during the interview. “Usually, crypto bubbles last around 6-9 months after surpassing the previous peak, after which the rapid fall comes quite quickly. This time, the bull market lasted for almost a year and a half,” the developer added.
Buterin also talked extensively about the Bitcoin (BTC) network and The Merge, Ethereum’s long-awaited transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). He claims Bitcoin doesn’t cut it when it comes to block subsidy fee income.
“In the long term, Bitcoin security comes solely from fees, and Bitcoin just isn’t succeeding in getting the level of fee revenue required to secure what could be a multi-billion-dollar system,” Buterin said.
When Smith asked Buterin about Bitcoin’s energy use, the Ethereum co-founder noted that PoS will not only reduce damage to the environment, it’s also about keeping the blockchain secure.
“A consensus system that unnecessarily costs huge amounts of electricity is not only bad for the environment, it also requires the issuance of hundreds of thousands of BTC or ETH every year,” Buterin stressed. “Eventually, of course, the issuance will decrease to almost zero, and then it will stop being a problem, but then Bitcoin will start to deal with another problem: how to make sure that it remains secure.” Buterin added:
And these security motivations are also a very important driver behind Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake.
Buterin understands that Bitcoin will not change its consensus mechanism, at least for now, but if the chain was attacked, he believes the discussion of a hybrid PoS algorithm could come into play.
“Of course, if Bitcoin is indeed attacked, I expect the political will to switch to at least hybrid proof of stake will emerge quickly, but I expect it will be a painful transition,” the software developer told Smith. The Ethereum co-founder said he thinks people have the wrong idea that PoS gives the biggest stakeholders control of the network.
“There are also people who try to argue that PoS allows large stakeholders to control the protocol, but I think these arguments are simply wrong,” Buterin said. “They rest on a misconception that PoW and PoS are governance mechanisms, when in reality they are consensus mechanisms. All they do is help the network agree on the right chain.”
Buterin went on to note that he thinks the early version of PoW was a good starting point, but today he believes it is obsolete, on its way out the door, and likely not coming back.
The highly democratized early proof-of-work era was a beautiful thing, and it helped enormously to make cryptocurrency ownership more egalitarian, but it is unsustainable and it is not coming back.
What do you think of Vitalik Buterin’s comments on cryptocrash, the Bitcoin network and PoW vs. Bucket? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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