The young programmer said that Musk’s plans could put decentralization at risk. The expert considers it vital that users can run nodes to protect chains.
In recent days, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin questioned Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claims about Dogecoin (DOGE). The billionaire businessman stated that the cryptocurrency meme may emerge as a leading blockchain as it offers greater scalability. On his blog, the renowned programmer explained the balance that must exist between decentralization and scalability on public blockchains.
In his post, titled “The Limits of Blockchain Scalability”, Buterin objects to Musk’s approach. The latter said that it is possible to scale Dogecoin by speeding up block time 10 times, increasing block size 10 times, and decreasing fees 100 times.
Buterin finds Musk’s claim naive and even simplistic as he considers that it is not possible to scale the Dogecoin blockchain to that level. He believes that that would lead to extreme centralization and put its fundamental properties at risk.
Ethereum’s representative claimed that fragmentation would facilitate scalability comparable to that of many centralized chains. For example, he said that a fragmented Ethereum blockchain could handle a million transactions per second with the full security of a blockchain. “However, that would require a lot of work in order not to sacrifice the decentralization that makes blockchains so valuable,” he noted.
Buterin highlighted that the decentralization of blockchains is necessary to eliminate the risk that a single point of failure can cause. Besides, he said that it allows protecting a widely distributed network against coordinated attacks. Likewise, he notes that regular users running nodes freely contribute to this decentralization.
“If there is a community of 37 node runners and 80,000 passive listeners checking the signatures and blocking the headers, the attacker wins. If there is a community in which everyone runs a node, the attacker loses. No one knows the exact threshold from which herd immunity against coordinated attacks comes into play. However, it is absolutely clear that more nodes are good and fewer nodes are bad,” said Buterin.
Blockchains Are More Valuable When There Are More Nodes
It is also necessary to consider storage, bandwidth, and network computing power to run a node. For that reason, Buterin explains how to configure these three factors and their recommended values for a blockchain to work properly.
The developer adds that most users consider 512 gigabytes of storage to be an acceptable limit. Regarding bandwidth, he sets a block limit of 1 to 5 megabytes every twelve seconds approximately. The reason for this is that nodes must consider the overhead of the protocol and the transmission of transactions.
Regarding computing power, Buterin explains that 10% of the maximum capacity of a computer should be the limit. The reason for this is that nodes must save energy to deal with DDoS attacks and cope with short outages.
Musk reacted to the lengthy explanation that Buterin gave, hinting that he was not satisfied. Furthermore, he said that the founder of Ethereum is “afraid” of the possible effect of the growth of a network like Dogecoin.
The attention of the cryptocurrency community has focused on what Buterin and Musk have said so far in May. Analysts believe that Elon Musk has negatively influenced the Bitcoin market, leading to the recent crash. Meanwhile, Vitalik has said that the Tesla CEO’s influence on the blockchain market will not last forever.
By Alexander Salazar
