Ethereum Co-Founder, Vitalik Buterin Points to Flaws in Elon Musk’s Attempts to Scale Dogecoin

Elon has requested that Dogecoin needs to change substantially to support payment, a change Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Burterin believes is “flawed.”

A Growing Rivalry

 It all began on May 15th, when  Elon Musk announced to the world, via twitter, his hopes / goals with the meme coin, Dogecoin. Musk tweeted out:

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Musk’s plan, that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is critical of, is that Musk hopes Dogecoin speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X and drops fees 100X. Musk hopes that Tesla and Dogecoin can at some point work together in the near future.

However, on May 23rd, just 8 days after Musk tweeted, Buterin published an article expressing his critique of Elon Musk’s plan to build out crypto, specifically Dogecoin. CoinTelegraph soon thereafter released their own article via twitter with a headline reading, “Vitalik says Elon Musk’s Plan for scaling crypto 10x is fundamentally flawed.”  That same day Musk, responded to the tweet:

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There appears to be a bit of a disagreement between the two heavyweight crypto influencers. But why does Buterin think Musk’s plan is a bad one? 

Less Secure 

Buterin believes that altering Dogecoin to Musk’s specifications results in two problems. The first, is that the network becomes less secure. Block chains use something called nodes, which validate transactions and create new blocks. For a blockchain to operate securely, the network wants as many nodes as possible, however, the more nodes, the longer transactions take. 

“We don’t know what the exact threshold is at which herd immunity against coordinated attacks kicks in, but there is one thing that’s absolutely clear: more nodes good, fewer nodes bad, and we definitely need more than a few dozen or few hundred,” Buterin wrote. 

To facilitate the transaction speeds that Musk hopes to achieve, Buterin warns that this will significantly hurt the integrity of the Dogecoin protocol, and leave it open to attack. 

The Bottlenecks of Power

The second major critique levied by Buterin is that every blockchain’s nodes have three bottlenecks, which are computing power, internet connection bandwidth, and storage capacity. To increase the performance of Dogecoin to the extent Musk desires, this would require a tremendous amount of power. 

The result of Musk’s upgrade to Doge would mean that the average crypto trader would lack the necessary equipment to run Doge effectively. This would mean users would have to buy better hardware and devices. Buterin does not believe that asking the mass crypto community to upgrade their hardware is optimal. In fact, if an upgrade would be needed by average traders to run Dogecoin, it would create barriers to entry and inefficiency. 

Concluding Thoughts

It is always exciting to see two of the great minds and innovators of our time battle things out and exchange ideas. Musk and Buterin are two of the most prominent crypto figures in crypto space. Whether a fan of Musk or Buterin, the real hope is that both these great innovators push each other further to create miraculous achievements in crypto. A great rivalry might be just what crypto needs. At the time of writing, Dogecoin was trading $.34 at and Ethereum was trading at 2,752.72. 

Dogecoin

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was built out by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who at the time decided to create a payment method as a joke, poking fun at the speculation in cryptocurrencies. Despite its humorous nature, some now consider it a legitimate investment prospect. Dogecoin can be used for transactions and purchases, but it is criticized for not being a very effective store of value. This is mainly because there is no lifetime cap on the number of Dogecoins that can be created by mining—meaning that the cryptocurrency is highly inflationary. 

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Ethereum 

Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for anyone – regardless of background or location. The protocol is a community-built technology that lets you send cryptocurrency to anyone for a small fee. It also powers financial applications that everyone can use and no one can take down. In other words, it is the world’s programmable blockchain.

Source : bsc.news