This week, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum project, took to Twitter Spaces to state that Bitcoin needs to be more than just about payment. It should have more scaling solutions.
He was highlighting the various experiments that Ethereum has been conducting in the last few years. But, he believes that politics remains the primary problem.
Bitcoin’s dilemma
Buterin said that there is weird politics surrounding Bitcoin and he added that he did not vibe with them.
More than 32,000 people were listening to the Ethereum inventor talk with Udi Wertheimer, a Bitcoin developer, and Eric Wall, the ‘altcoin slayer’, as he discussed what Ethereum can teach Bitcoiners.
The trio discussed one of the most difficult aspects of the pioneer crypto in the world; the fact that it has a slow transaction throughput.
Therefore, the largest crypto by market cap needs to have scaling solutions for boosting the speed at which the digital asset can be sent and received.
Most of the discussion between the three was around scaling, as this is where they believe that Bitcoiners can learn from its competitor chain, Ethereum.
Buterin said that if Bitcoin wants to move beyond payments, it would need to have scaling solutions, such as ZK Rollups and Plasma. They have already tried the two on Ethereum.
Ethereum’s moves
Buterin asserted that two successful examples that could be used as case studies for Bitcoin were Arbitrum and Optimism.
He went on to say that having an open mind would be a plus, particularly where ZK-based solutions are concerned, which showed a clear preference.
Over the years, there have been several experiments conducted with different scaling solutions on the Ethereum blockchain.
The network is currently undergoing its latest update called EIP-4844, which will facilitate about 100,000 transactions in a second.
According to Wall, these trials should be studied by Bitcoin, or else the ecosystem would have to deal with less secure rollups.
But, Buterin stated that security hawks would likely create a controversy over the proposal.
Security model
Taking the spotlight with the Taproot Wizards, Wall also talked about the security model of Bitcoin as well as its market cap of 21 million.
Buterin responded that he had been grappling with this question himself, but he said that Ordinals were capable of offering a reasonable fee market that would cover the declining block subsidies.
He added that the security concerns could also be addressed via Ordinals. He also believes that they have brought back the builder culture, which is a good thing.
He went on to say that Ordinals have brought hope along. Apart from that, Buterin highlighted some of the things that the two ecosystems share.
He said that both chains are immutable and layer-1 privacy issues also exist in them. Plus, they have also made it clear that using the decentralized consensus models is extremely difficult to use.
In conclusion, Buterin was positive and said that the world needs to have at least one of the two blockchains.