Peter Todd casually called Ethereum a “scam” in response to a tweet by Vitalik Buterin this morning, and suggested that Buterin and others billed it as scalable when they knew it not to be.
Given that ETH 1.0 has turned out to be a scam, advertised repeatedly as scalable by people like you who knew it wasn't, why shouldn't an article lead with the obvious question: Will ETH 2.0 also be a scam?
— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) October 9, 2019
The tweet by Vitalik Buterin was responding to Coindesk journalist Leigh Cuen.
Sorry but this article is very unfair. Even insinuating that eth2 may be a "scam" in the title disrespects years of hard work by dozens of people, especially given that phase 0 is months away.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) October 8, 2019
‘Scam or Iteration?’
Cuen’s article was titled ‘Scam’ or Iteration? At Devcon, Ethereum Diehards Still Believe in 2.0. In the article, she wrote:
‘Predictable cries of “scam” from ardent bitcoiners followed. But Lubin’s statement wasn’t scandalous in the least to the ethereum fans at Devcon – the community’s largest and most influential annual gathering – where roughly 3,000 attendees gathered this week in Osaka, Japan.’
The article describes an Ethereum community not at odds with the current scaling roadmap. The upcoming hardfork changes have been on the Ethereum roadmap from the beginning.
Todd wasn’t the only person on Twitter to be critical of Buterin.
Where has this ever been advertised? Serenity has been on the roadmap since the very beginning of Ethereum.
Haven't you lost enough credibility?
— antiprosynthesis (@antiprosynth) October 9, 2019
At issue is the question of Ethereum’s scalability, and whether it’s always been clear that the base version of Ethereum would fail to live up to all the demands placed on it. Crypto circles have been alive with the word that Joseph Lubin now openly admits to Ethereum’s scaling problems.
Joseph Lubin said at the Devcon (conference) this week that he and the other founders of Ethereum were fully aware it would not scale.
A quick Google search of “Joseph Lubin + scaling” will reveal to the reader that the man has for years said quite the opposite about Ethereum, expressing great confidence in its scalability up until very recently.
The revelation has been a bit of a bombshell in both Ethereum and Bitcoin circles, as Leigh Cuen describes above.
Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures
Erstwhile, competing chains have cropped up, including Tron, which can support basically any dApp that Ethereum can, using a very similar infrastructure.
Then there is EOS which, as we showed our readers yesterday, regularly does more transactions than Ethereum.
Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer who has from time to time engaged in Twitter drama, continued to explain that the “scam” Ethereum has perpetuated is one of the most “common.”
The most common type of scam in the crypto space has been claiming that things scale when they don't, and that things are trustless when they aren't. ETH 1.0 has done both types of scam.
They're the hardest challenges; fertile ground for lying. https://t.co/72iUT2pyZA
— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) October 9, 2019
