The founder of Ethereum argued with Musk about blockchain scalability
The founder of Ethereum turned his attention to technical reality.
Vitalik Buterin, an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel and founder of Ethereum, wrote an article in which he disputed the claim of Tesla and SpaxeX founder Ilon Musk that it is possible to “speed up block creation time by 10 times, increase block size by 10 times, and achieve a 100-fold reduction in transaction fees. Buterin believes it cannot be done without leading to “supercentralization in the registry, which would change the fundamentals” of blockchain.
The founder of Ethereum is convinced that even introducing innovations such as ZK-SNARKs or sharding does not fundamentally change anything in terms of blockchain throughput because:
“It turns out that there are important and very subtle technical circumstances that limit the scalability of blockchain, with or without the use of sharding. In many cases, there are some solutions for this, but even these solutions have their limitations.”
Buterin noted through various examples that “for a blockchain to remain decentralized, it is necessary for every user of a distributed ledger to be able to manage a blockchain node.” The Ethereum founder noted that the more users of the blockchain manage nodes, the more stable it works, but in reality all users are not managing nodes because there are a number of technical limitations.
Computers cannot fully, 100%, use their operating power to validate transactions when managing nodes, and that is the reality. Managing nodes in a mode where external memory is involved can raise the speed of transaction processing, but there is a limit here too, as Buterin suggests: “perhaps it can speed up by a factor of three, but no more.”
As a conclusion, the founder of Ethereum stated his belief that a tradition will develop in the blockchain environment, that the management of distributed ledger nodes will become the destiny not of a relatively small circle of enthusiasts, but of as many distributed ledger users as possible.
