Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin is at it again, and this time, he’s throwing quite some shade. Speaking at a conference in January 2019, Buterin grabbed a chance to express his opinion about some other crypto networks when a member of the audience asked him about the transaction processing speed of Ethereum’s Casper CBC upgrade that’s still under development.
Just as he’s come to be known, Vitalik didn’t mince his words in expressing his definite description of those crypto networks that he deemed as trashy. In fact, he went as far as describing them as “centralized piles of trash.”
Higher TPS Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Secure
Going further, the Ethereum co-founder was adamant in arguing that in a real sense, having a crypto network with astonishingly high TPS doesn’t actually mean that the network is secure. With that, Buterin seems to front a valid point – some new crypto networks like Verge have been successfully attacked a few times. On the other hand, a relatively slow network like Bitcoin is yet to experience an attack.
What’s His Perspective?
In his argument, Vitalik said that the main point of creating decentralized networks is to make them safe and free from government meddling, adding that some crypto networks that have high TPS are in fact centralized in that they use localized nodes controlled by entities, making them vulnerable to control and that they can be shut down any time. Indeed, such a network would be considered centralized.
However, Vitalik was quick to point out that a secure crypto network like Bitcoin or Ethereum need not be so slow, adding that layer-1 and layer-2 technologies can be used to speed up the networks without compromising security. Such scaling solutions have been used to speed up networks, the most recent of which being Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
Casper CBC
Casper CBC (Correct-By-Construction) is a new upcoming scaling solution planned for implementation by the Ethereum Foundation. The system works by continually expanding a protocol to achieve better latency without affecting its integrity or the security of the whole network.
The implementation of Casper is meant to steer the Ethereum network away from being majorly dependent on a proof-of-state consensus system that has been found to be overly wasteful in terms of power and developmental resources. As such, the Casper CBC system is expected to also boost Ethereum’s TPS.
