Bitcoin Vs Ethereum with Samson Mow & Vitalik Buterin

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“It comes down to what you think money is, and money is really a zero sum game. We’re not going to walk around in a world with thousands or tens of thousands of monies.”
— Samson Mow

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Location: Squadcast
Date: Thursday 13th August
Company: Blockstream & Ethereum
Role: Chief Strategy Officer & Founder

The Bitcoin community can be a very hostile place, in an industry that has more than its fair share of scams and questionable projects it often falls at the feet of Bitcoiners to call them out.

In many ways, Ethereum is the antithesis of Bitcoin. Whereas Bitcoin is slow and conservative in its goals and development, the ethos of Ethereum is to ‘move fast and break things’. These philosophical differences often lead to fiery debates between the two communities.

Over the past few days, a new debate was sparked by the seeming inability to verify the total supply of Ethereum. Supplygate has divided the two communities again with many Bitcoiners believing that the ability to audit the supply should be one of the fundamental principles of a money system. With Bitcoin, it is the monetary policy which gives it value over fiat, therefore having a fixed supply and the ability for anyone to run a node and audit the supply is critical.

Believers in Ethereum argue that Ethereum’s value proposition is different and that difficulty of getting consensus around the total supply is not a significant issue.

During this debate Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream, Samson Mow, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin traded blows on Twitter. I asked them to come on the show and discuss the philosophical differences between Ethereum vs Bitcoin.

TIMESTAMPS

00:05:05: Introductions
00:07:04: Friction between Bitcoin and Ethereum
00:12:26: Pivoting technology
00:14:19: What is Ethereum?
00:19:46: Unit of account
00:21:07: ETH 2.0 roadmap and delivery
00:25:05: Raiden
00:26:18: Are Bitcoiners too close minded?
00:28:03: Ethereum is freedom
00:32:14: DAO hack
00:37:24: Ice Age rollbacks
00:40:19: Bitcoin and Ethereum co-existing
00:43:43: Chain rollbacks
00:46:25: Criticisms of Ethereum
00:50:20: Bitcoiners and the Bitcoin culture
00:53:05: Ethereum still developing
00:56:12: Does Vitalik feel responsible for Ethereum
00:58:59: How does Ethereum succeed?
01:01:35: Worries about Bitcoin
01:05:40: Ethereum verifying the Bitcoin blockchain
01:07:22: Nodes on Ethereum
01:11:25: Ethereum’s supply
01:17:24: Importance of the supply issue
01:21:42: Complications of Ethereum
01:24:41: Infura
01:27:01: Transaction fees
01:32:46: Central planning
01:35:13: Concepts of trust in Bitcoin and Ethereum
01:41:06: Correct node utilisation 
01:45:28: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

PodcastPeter McCormack