Vitalik: Why Elon Musk’s plan for scaling crypto 10x is ‘fundamentally flawed’

[RSS News]

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has posted a lengthy paper on the limits to blockchain scalability, criticizing claims made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The article,*published*on Buterin’s personal blog on Sunday, emphasizes the trade-off between decentralization and scalability in architecting blockchain networks. The article comes in response to Elon Musk’s May 15 tweet*asserting that Dogecoin will emerge as the leading chain if it moves to increase its block size by 900%:

“Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.”

Buterin challenged Musk’s proposition, emphasizing the challenge of seeking to achieve a sharp increase in scalability and throughput “without leading to extreme centralization and compromising the fundamental properties that make a blockchain what it is.”

Buterin stressed the need for decentralization to eliminate the risk of a network having a single point of failure and the protections that a widely distributed network enjoys against coordinated attacks. He added that decentralization cannot be achieved without regular users being freely able to run nodes.

“For a blockchain to be decentralized, it’s crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity.”

Buterin also asserted that sharding can facilitate comparable scalability to that offered by many centralized chains. Based on the current state of the Ethereum network, Buterin predicts that a sharded Ethereum could “probably process one 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,” he added.

In March, the Ethereum co-founder suggested that*rollups will be deployed on Ethereum before sharding ships with Ethereum 2.0.

UPDATE: Elon Musk*responded to Buterin via a comment on this article on Twitter. The tweet is embedded below.

He fears the … pic.twitter.com/78WzM5ICjA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2021