Vitalik Buterin Responds to Elon Musk on Why His Intention to Scale Crypto 10x Is Flawed

Ethereum (ETH) Co-founder Vitalik Buterin had some words for Elon Musk after posting on Twitter that Dogecoin could increase its block size by 900%.

Vitalik had several counterarguments for Musk’s claims in a paper published on his personal blog. He emphasised that scalability and higher throughput can be achieved by simply increasing the network’s parameters. However, this could compromise the system to extreme centralisation and completely flip a blockchain’s original concept.

Scaling Doge 10x Is “Fundamentally Flawed”

Vitalik said there are two possible ways to try to scale a blockchain: technical improvements and increasing parameters.

Increasing parameters is “fundamentally flawed,” according to Buterin, as computers running blockchain nodes “cannot spend 100% of CPU power to validate the chain“. Computers need spare capacity for processing transactions in the mempool, and this would make it unusable for any other applications while running the node, he added.

Besides, DoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks are unlikely against a decentralised network, the reason why computers validating the chain need a large safety margin to resist such attacks. Vitalik also outlined the importance of users being fully able to run nodes to make the ecosystem truly decentralised.

“For a blockchain to be decentralised, 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.” Stated Buterin

Sharding the Ethereum Blockchain

Fundamentals technical improvements can work, however. Vitalik talked about the current bottleneck in Ethereum, which is storage size. “Statelessness and state expiry can fix this and allow an increase of perhaps up to ~3x – but not more, as we want running a node to become easier than it is today,” he said.

On the other hand, sharding the Ethereum blockchain could highly improve scalability up to 1 million transactions per second, according to Buterin, without risking network security. Back on March 10, Buterin claimed that a layer-2 solution could boost Ethereum’s throughput to 100x in a few months.

Elon’s Response to Buterin

While Vitalik took the time to address and lay down the key aspects and challenges of scaling a blockchain, Elon only said that “He fears the Doge,” with a poster of a Shiba Inu trying to bite a dollar bill underwater —with a caption saying, “You’ll never use the dollar again.”

Featured image courtesy of Yahoo Finance