Vitalik Buterin is anything but a fan of proof of work and he is not shy in showing how firm his stance towards it is. Today he took another dig at bitcoin and its consensus mechanism in a tweet that he quickly deleted but a specialized Twitter account caught it and reposted it:
His tweet implies that bitcoin will eventually also switch to the “energy efficient” proof of stake, just like Ethereum plans to do it in the coming years.
Vitalik expressed his dislike of proof of work on countless occassions:
As one would expect, this tweet spurred an avalanche or angry rebuttals:
” When the cult leader of a premined coin believes in something else than PoW, which is currently used to “protect” his “world computer”.
The only things he believes in is his premine, reframing common sense as maximalism, oligarchic structures and centralization”
” “…in order to sell my new shiny respiratory system substitute to illiterate investors, with pseudoscientific marketing entirely based on lies about how bad the current respiratory systems are and how sound CO2 breathing theories are.”
“Fortunately Bitcoin sidechains make Ethereum obsolete, so people don’t have to believe in you “
Buterin and PoW animosity
On a TechCrunch conference about blockchain, back in July, when asked if he feels that the criticism of PoS algorithms as being too centralized is fair, Buterin went on to explain that those issues are exaggerated and that PoW ones suffer from centralization much more. He pointed out that Bitmain and a couple of related mining pools currently own over 40% of Bitcoin’s hashing power and immediately further expanded on this point:
“Back in 2013, when GHash had 51 percent everybody freaked out. It’s happening a second time and people aren’t really talking about it this much.”
The issue has been brought to light after recent flooding issues destroyed thousands of crypto mining rigs across China’s Sichuan area. It became apparent that these mining rigs belonged to a small number of concentrated actors who simply purchased insane amounts of hardware and employed it to mine Bitcoin for them. Buterin feels it’s very likely that currently active and popular mining pools operate on this model and questions their ownership and geographic centralization.
“Proof of Work is rich get richer squared”, concludes Vitalik, seemingly avoiding to address PoS/DPoS centralization issues that have been exposed with the latest EOS mainnet launch.
