Vitalik Buterin criticises Elon Musk’s Dogecoin scalability plan

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin criticised Elon Musk for remarks about increasing Dogecoin’s scalability and reducing its network fees.

The limits to blockchain scalability (or, why you can’t «just increase the block size by 10x»):https://t.co/y08T3TMr2U

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 23, 2021

On May 16, Musk stated that Dogecoin «could easily overtake» Bitcoin, if «in principle» he increases the speed of block production and their size tenfold, and reduces fees by 100x.

Buterin noted that sharply increasing scalability and throughput of the blockchain, without depriving it of fundamental properties such as decentralisation, is an extremely difficult task.

According to the Ethereum co-founder, decentralisation is necessary to mitigate the risk of a single point of failure, and to guard against coordinated attacks.

«It is extremely important that ordinary users can run nodes, and that there exists a culture in which managing these nodes is routine», — added he.

Buterin noted that sharding can provide scalability comparable to that offered by many centralized networks. He predicts that by using this method Ethereum will «likely process more than a million transactions per second with full security of the blockchain».

In response, Musk suggested that the co-founder of the second cryptocurrency «fears» Dogecoin.

He fears the … pic.twitter.com/78WzM5ICjA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2021

Earlier, the Tesla founder said that layer-2 protocols like Lightning Network are necessary for scalability. In his words, this issue is more important than the decentralisation of finance.

Earlier, Buterin described the market situation as a financial bubble. He also noted that Bitcoin risks falling behind if it does not develop its technological base.