Vitalik Suggests Elon Musk’s Plan For Scaling Dogecoin is Unviable

Elon Musk’s claims of Dogecoin’s superiority sparked a critical view from Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin, who firmly disagrees with him.

In a blog post published on May 23, Vitalik gave some detailed thoughts on blockchain scalability. In part, the post refuted Elon’s claim that a massive increase to Dogecoin’s block size would scale the network to a victorious extent.

On May 15, Elon claimed that if Doge speeds up block time 10X, it increases block size 10X & drops the fee 100X, it would emerge as a leader among cryptocurrencies upon implementing the specific changes.

Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2021

KYC and Audit Solutions For Every Project!

Limitations of Blockchain Scaling

Vitalik Buterin made a lengthy post on the limits to blockchain scalability, criticizing claims made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The article was published on Buterin’s personal blog on Sunday. It emphasized the trade-off between decentralization and scalability in architecting blockchain networks.

Buterin noted that there were “important” but “quite subtle technical factors” that limit blockchain scaling.

Vitalik argued that increasing block size so tremendously may make it impossible for the vast majority of Dogecoin holders to run full nodes. The increasing block sizes aspect could cause extreme centralization.

Buterin referenced a tweet by Musk expounding why it is difficult to make “Musk’s wishes” come true “without leading to extreme centralization and compromising the fundamental properties that make a blockchain what it is.

He insisted that it was necessary “for blockchain decentralization for regular users to be able to run a node.

Buterin mentioned decentralization as a means to reduce security risks and network failures. He emphasized that they aren’t aware of the exact threshold at which herd immunity against coordinated attacks kicks in. Still, there is one thing that’s crystal clear: more nodes good, fewer nodes bad, and they need more than a few dozen or a few hundred.

Roadblocks to Capacity

Buterin also asserted that sharding could facilitate comparable scalability to that offered by many centralized chains. Considering the current situation of the Ethereum network, Buterin thinks that a sharded Ethereum could “possibly process one a million transactions per second with the full security of a blockchain.”

Buterin noted that while sharded blockchains can scale much further since no single node in a sharded blockchain needs to process every transaction. Still, there are hindrances to capacity.

Btc

Bitcoin

$27.941
price

0.89264%
price change

TRADE NOW

He added that it would take work to do this without sacrificing the decentralization that makes blockchains so relevant.