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

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

The article, published on Buterin’s private weblog on Sunday, emphasizes the trade-off between decentralization and scalability in architecting blockchain networks. The article is available in response to Elon Musk’s Could 15 tweet asserting that Dogecoin will emerge because the main chain if it strikes to extend its block measurement by 900%:

“Ideally, Doge hastens block time 10X, will increase block measurement 10X & drops price 100X. Then it wins fingers down.”

Buterin challenged Musk’s proposition, emphasizing the problem of searching for to attain a pointy improve in scalability and throughput “with out resulting in excessive centralization and compromising the basic properties that make a blockchain what it’s.”

Buterin pressured the necessity for decentralization to eradicate the danger of a community having a single level of failure and the protections {that a} extensively distributed community enjoys towards coordinated assaults. He added that decentralization can’t be achieved with out common customers being freely capable of run nodes.

“For a blockchain to be decentralized, it’s crucially essential for normal customers to have the ability to run a node, and to have a tradition the place working nodes is a standard exercise.”

Buterin additionally asserted that sharding can facilitate comparable scalability to that supplied by many centralized chains. Primarily based on the present state of the Ethereum community, Buterin predicts {that a} sharded Ethereum may “in all probability course of one one million transactions per second with the complete safety of a blockchain.”

“Nevertheless it’s going to take work to do that with out sacrificing the decentralization that makes blockchains so worthwhile,” he added.

In March, the Ethereum co-founder advised that rollups will be deployed on Ethereum earlier than sharding ships with Ethereum 2.0.

UPDATE: Elon Musk responded to Buterin by way of a touch upon this text on Twitter. The tweet is embedded under.