The Battle of Bitcoin and Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin Debates the Issue of Liquidity with Samson Mow Online
Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom), by Donnager, published with permission.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
Two representatives of the Ethereum and Bitcoin communities conducted detailed and in-depth discussions on whether cryptocurrencies need to have the maximum circulation. Samson Mow, a representative of the Bitcoin community, believes that having the largest circulation is the most important feature of the Bitcoin protocol, while Vitalik Buterin, a representative of the Ethereum community, believes that the entire Ethereum community does not pay much attention to circulation.
This also stems from the completely different design concepts and visions of these two projects. Bitcoin focuses on being a tool for value storage and transfer. They hope to be defined as "money", while Ethereum has been looking for its own application scenarios. Become a general-purpose platform similar to C++.
Samson Mow is the chief strategy officer of Blockstream and the founder of the space adventure game "Infinity Fleet". Blockstream is the technology research and development organization that has the most profound impact on the Bitcoin protocol. Many of its engineer team are core contributors to the Bitcoin protocol , not only launched Bitcoin’s first side chain network Liquid, but also developed the Bitcoin Lightning Network client c-lightning, and launched satellites to broadcast data on the Bitcoin network.
Vitalik Buterin is one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the core representative of Ethereum.
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The cause of the controversy?
The "grievances" between Blockstream and Ethereum have a long history. For example, at the beginning of this month, Blockstream CEO Adam Back had a round with Vitalik Buterin. When Back replied to other people's messages, he said that Ethereum and Ponzi schemes Similarly, while Buterin believes that Ethereum is on the rise, the tide of history will not favor (Bitcoin) maximalists.
But this debate over whether cryptocurrencies should have a "maximum circulation" originated from a tweet by Buterin. He said on August 6 that although many people try to criticize Ethereum because it does not have a circulation limit of 21 million like Bitcoin, in fact, in the past two months, the income from transaction fees in the network has been high enough to completely offset it. Post-EIP-1559 PoS rewards.
In fact, in the past two months, for miners, the transaction fees in the Ethereum network have increased rapidly, even higher than block rewards. Last week, according to OKLink data, Ethereum miners’ fee income has exceeded the block reward. The average ETH block income is 5 ETH, the block reward is 2 ETH, and the remaining 3 ETH is the fee income.
In a reply to the tweet, a user named vladimirovich stated that "having a maximum circulation limit" is a "security hole" in the blockchain. As we all know, one of the most important characteristics of cryptocurrencies headed by Bitcoin is that they have the largest circulation. For example, the total amount of Bitcoin is 21 million BTC, which is set in the rules and cannot be broken.
Interestingly, Vitalik Buterin liked this tweet and was seen by Samson Mow. Since then, the two parties have started a debate on "maximum circulation".
Not to be outdone, Buterin replied directly, "Yes, that's what I mean." Because he believes that a blockchain system with a limited total amount will not be able to provide guaranteed rewards, which may also lead to the failure of the blockchain. Security issues, so through a lower level of cryptocurrency issuance mechanism, is the right way to ensure the minimum security level of the blockchain. He also added that issued tokens can also be recycled through mechanisms such as EIP-1559.
But in fact, for Bitcoin miners, even if there is no block reward, they can still earn income through transaction fees as an incentive and provide security for the blockchain network. Mow also used this point of view to refute Buterin.
Then the two began a protracted confrontation, which also involved terms such as free market, Internet access, Internet security, public goods, immutability, etc., to supplement their respective views.Peter McCormackLooking at the views of both parties as a whole, Samson Mow believes that the most important feature of Bitcoin is its immutability, which is the largest supply, but Vitalik Buterin insists that when the blockchain lacks usage scenarios, network maintainers rely on Pure transaction fee income may not be able to cover security maintenance costs (that is, after block rewards disappear).What Bitcoin Didsecondary title
Twitter not enough fun?
The two sides were not having enough fun in the discussion on Twitter, so British Bitcoin enthusiasts
Invite the two to his own podcast
for a more comprehensive and in-depth discussion.
However, it needs to be explained in advance that Peter McCormack said that the audience of his blog program may not be particularly knowledgeable about specific technologies, and he himself is only a Bitcoin enthusiast, and about 15% of his assets are Bitcoin. It was not clear what stage it was, but he said he would discuss it with both parties as objectively as possible.
Shuangfa discussed the core concept differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum in detail, although many of the topics were commonplace, such as The DAO hacking, pre-mining, PoS and PoW, and the Ethereum infrastructure is too centralized wait.
On the whole, this interview is more like the host and Samson Mow questioning the overly complex design concept of Ethereum and thus compromising decentralization, while Vitalik Buterin believes that the two projects should develop together, even if Ethereum is still Very early days and lots of problems, but at least it's on track. Samson Mow said, “I think Vitalik Buterin is an outstanding marketing guru, probably even better than Justin Sun.”
For these two Bitcoin Hodlers, they are not familiar with the progress of the Ethereum blockchain, such as the progress of ETH 2.0, and once again questioned the history of Ethereum’s transaction rollback due to hacking attacks, and There are various security risks in the DeFi community at present, and even Samson Mow believes that Vitalik Buterin should be more active in warning users of the risks of DeFi. Vitalik Buterin said that he spent 15 minutes in the Bankless program more than a month ago The risks of DeFi and Yield Farming are highlighted.
Since this discussion covered a wide range of issues, here are some important and interesting excerpts from it.
Peter McCormack: Do you agree with "Bitcoin and Ethereum" (the two coexist), or "Bitcoin or Ethereum" (either the two)?
Vitalik Buterin: I think Bitcoin and Ethereum can thrive together. I still hold hundreds of BTCs, and the Ethereum Foundation also holds BTCs.
Samson Mow: I only have BTC, no ETH. And I think most Bitcoin holders (Bitcoiner) will not hold ETH. In addition,I have a Litecoin sent to me by Charlie Lee (李启威). Bitcoin holders only want the bare essentials, but Ethereum keeps changing.
Peter McCormack: Bitcoin is very simple, that is, it provides the function of storing and transferring value, but Ethereum has always wanted to do many things, and the system is more complicated. Will this lead to a compromise in the degree of decentralization of Ethereum?
Samson Mow: In my opinion, the overall ideology of Ethereum is: let's try everything and see what's left.
Vitalik Buterin: (replying to Samson Mow) Indeed, you can say that. I have heard this statement before. The Bitcoin community believes that Bitcoin is 80% complete, but the Ethereum community believes that Ethereum is only 40% complete. But I now think that Ethereum should also be 60% complete. I think the three of us should agree on one thing: Ethereum is still far from realizing its final form, and the current project is still in a very early stage.
Peter McCormack: Under what circumstances do you think Ethereum or Bitcoin will fail?
Vitalik Buterin: I certainly think Ethereum is on its way to success. I think one indicator of success is how many people outside of the community are actually using it. For Bitcoin, there are already many non-industry people using it, and Ethereum has also touched these applications, although the scale is still much smaller.
Samson Mow: I'm actually not too worried about catastrophic failure. Bitcoin has a strong development team to ensure that the system has no loopholes and will not be attacked. Anyone can run a full node, so there is no need to worry about who can shut down the system, and even our Blockstream satellites broadcast data from the Bitcoin network. However, in the Ethereum ecosystem, Infura's infrastructure is like a center that needs to be trusted. As long as someone closes Infura, the Ethereum network will have catastrophic problems.
Peter McCormack: Vitalik, do you have anything to add about what Bitcoin might fail?
Vitalik Buterin: Encountered technical black swan events, such as the emergence of quantum computers. At the policy level, if some countries prohibit the bitcoin mining industry, etc., or are attacked by 51%. If I only mention one factor that only Bitcoin may fail, I think Bitcoin does not have Functionality Escape Velocity (functional escape velocity).
Peter McCormack: The total amount of Bitcoin is very clear, but the total amount of Ethereum is more complicated. Is it a range rather than an exact number?
Vitalik Buterin: There is one point that needs to be clarified in advance. The circulation of Ethereum is not ambiguous. It can be obtained by summarizing the data of the blockchain. However, there is currently no quick tool (script) provided in the client. such a function. And some clients have already begun to make scripts to provide such functions.
Samson Mow: If ETH is regarded as a functional token in the system and used to create smart contracts or DeFi applications, I think there is no problem. But if ETH is regarded as "money", there is a problem. For example, if you look at Monero or other cryptocurrencies, their total circulation is clearly auditable.
Vitalik Buterin: Users in the Ethereum community are not so concerned about whether the circulation of the network is equal to a certain magic number, such as 21 million. Bitcoin can calculate the circulation according to the block height, but because of the uncle block mechanism in Ethereum, it is difficult to calculate the circulation of the system at a certain block height in the future.
Peter McCormack: Is the maximum circulation of Ethereum determined? Will there be inflation?
