These Are Some Topics Ethereum Developers Disagree With Vitalik Buterin On

Blockchain Community Ethereum Vitalik Buterin

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Ruholamin Haqshanas

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Ruholamin Haqshanas

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Ruholamin Haqshanas is a contributing crypto writer for CryptoNews. He is a crypto and finance journalist with over four years of experience. Ruholamin has been featured in several high-profile crypto...

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October 23, 2023 08:58 EDT

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Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently asked the crypto Twitter community to share what they disagree with him on. Some prominent Ethereum developers were quick to use the opportunity and express their thoughts on various subjects.

“What do you disagree with me the most on?” the Ethereum mastermind said on Sunday.

In response, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko said he doesn’t agree with Buterin on how “quickly we can ship things.” He added that what he “fears” the developers may “never be able to ship quickly enough is a good solution for privacy.”

“IMO anything that’s not private by default for the vast majority of users is unlikely to work and the window where it’s possible to ship this is small,” Beiko added.

Polynya, a pseudonymous Ethereum researcher, seemed to disagree with Buterin on the subject of soulbound tokens, which are tokens that can’t be sold or separated from their owners.

Buterin has been very vocal about these tokens recently. After initially exploring the idea in a blog post earlier this year, he co-authored a research paper in mid-May explaining how non-transferable Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) can create a richer, pluralistic ecosystem within Ethereum, called “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc). Buterin expected soulbound tokens to be able to encode social relationships of trust. 

However, Polynya argued that “identity & reputation are complex and subjective variables that can never be adequately characterized by numbers on a blockchain,” adding that SBTs would have a very limited use case.

Identity & reputation are complex and subjective variables that can never be adequately characterized by numbers on a blockchain. As such, soulbound NFTs should be minimalist and only used in very specific usecases.

"Society" is massively decentralized, so "DeSoc" is a misnomer.

— polynya (@apolynya) June 5, 2022

Others similarly focused on SBTs:

Eric Conner, a product researcher at blockchain startup Gnosis, argued that Buterin’s focus on gambling in crypto may hurt the industry, as it “fuels” the mainstream perception of it all being a gambling scam. 

Anthony Sassano, Ethereum educator and founder of The Daily Gwei blog, wrote that Buterin shouldn’t have given legitimacy to the best-known memecoin, Dogecoin (DOGE).

Meanwhile, Ethereum core developer Hudson Jameson opined that Buterin’s avoidance of political topics does not make his stance neutral, but rather “only give[s] more power to aggressors and oppressors.”

world and taking a stance of being neutral on topics will only give more power to aggressors and oppressors, even if it is in subtle ways where the topic isn't obviously good vs evil to every person looking at it.

— Hudson Jameson (@hudsonjameson) June 5, 2022

Mariano Conti, Head of Smart Contracts at the Maker Foundation, touched on the topic of immortality.

In a June 2021 interview with computer scientist and YouTuber Lex Fridman, Buterin claimed that humans could eventually live forever. “I definitely think that we can get there,” he said at the time.

“Dunno but as I get older I’m starting to make peace with the fact that we’re on this planet for a little while, hopefully live happy and productive lives, and then make way for new generations,” Mariano said.

And Santi Siri of Proof of Humanity hinted at a story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges that describes “immortals as beasts that eventually end up lacking time and language.” 

borges describes immortals as beasts that eventually end up lacking time and language… he has written a story about it, the immortal, who seeks a city —a culture, a language— with the hope to be able to understand the world again. https://t.co/tXJXysH85G

— santi (@santisiri) June 5, 2022

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