The Ethereum co-founder says there are big flaws in the billionaire's ideas.
Vitalik Buterin has criticized Elon Musk for his proposed changes to Dogecoin’s blockchain.
The Tesla billionaire, who has become a bit of a love/hate figure in crypto circles, recently said that he would like to see DOGE’s block size and block times be 10 times faster than now — with fees 100 times lower than they are now. Then, Musk said, its network would “win hands down.”
Although this sounds incredibly tempting, the Ethereum co-founder says such a feat is difficult to achieve “without leading to extreme centralization and compromising the fundamental properties that make a blockchain what it is.”
Buterin wrote:
“As it turns out, there are important and quite subtle technical factors that limit blockchain scaling, both with sharding and without. In many cases there are solutions, but even with the solutions there are limits."
Achieving Scalability
According to Buterin, simply increasing the parameters of existing blockchains — the method that Musk advocates — sounds attractive at first but is “flawed.” Instead, he is in favour of “fundamental technical improvements” that still enable regular users to run a node… encouraging a culture where this is a regular activity.
Concluding his post, he explained that the current bottleneck in Ethereum concerns storage size… and a top priority is ensuring that running a node becomes easier than it is today. The ETH blockchain is currently making the transition to Proof-of-Stake, which should help eliminate the high fees and congestion we see right now. He concluded:
“Sharded blockchains can scale much further, because no single node in a sharded blockchain needs to process every transaction. But even there, there are limits to capacity … We don't have to worry too much: those limits are high enough that we can probably process over a million transactions per second with the full security of a blockchain. But it's going to take work to do this without sacrificing the decentralization that makes blockchains so valuable.”
