“I think if we want Bitcoin to be more than a payment, it needs more scaling solutions,” said Vitalik Buterin, in a Spaces on Twitter this week, focusing on several experiments that Ethereum tried in previous years.
But the main problem, for him, is politics.
“Bitcoin has really weird politics,” he said, adding that he “didn’t vibe with them.”
Over 32,000 people tune in to listen as Ethereum inventor talks to “altcoin slayer” Eric Wall and Bitcoin developers Come to Wertheimer about what Bitcoiners can learn from Ethereum.
The trio solves one of the main pain points of the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap: Bitcoin’s slow transaction throughput, and thus the need for layer two scaling methods to increase the speed at which people can send and receive digital assets.
Much of the discussion revolved around scaling, where Buterin, Wall, and Wertheimer think Bitcoiners can learn the most from the supposed rival chain.
“I think if we want Bitcoin to be more than a payment, scaling options like Plasma or ZK are needed. Rollups“said Buterin, who tested both on Ethereum. optimization and decision are two successful examples of “rollups” that can serve as case studies for Bitcoin, he said, adding that it’s “good to have an open mind” about ZK-snark based solutions-which show of a clear will.
Ethereum has been experimenting with different scaling solutions for years, and is in the process of the latest update, EIP-4844which identifies blob blocks–enables up to 100,000 transactions per second.
Wall pushed the idea that Bitcoin must study these tests, fearing that the ecosystem will be left with less secure rollups. Buterin responded that the proposal would likely create “controversy among security hawks.”
Wall, who took the stage late in the Taproot Wizardsbrings Bitcoin’s security modeland the 21 million hard cap. It’s a question Buterin says he’s grappling with, even as he points out ordinals as providing a reasonable compensation market to cover the reduction in block subsidies as well as subsequent security concerns.
Buterin also thinks that the Ordinals have brought a “return to building culture” which in his words is “very good.” He added that he “definitely sees signs of hope now that we have Ordinals,” calling them a “real push to laser eye maximalism.”
Buterin also tried to find ten things that the two ecosystems share. He points to claims that cannot be changed on the same chain, along with the fact that they both have layer-1 privacy issues. Buterin also mentioned that Ethereum and Bitcoin show how hard it is to do things decentralized consensus models.
The Ethereum co-founder ended on a somewhat optimistic note, trying to possibly bring the two communities together.
“I think a world where there is at least one of these chains is better than one without,” he concluded.
