Bram Cohen, the new CEO of crypto startup Chia Network, recently issued a statement criticizing Ethereum‘s scalability and performance limitations.

According to Cohen, while Ethereum is conceived as a “world computer” with infinite on-chain scalability, this is a silly idea because all on-chain validation must be replicated by all full nodes, which is highly redundant of.

Cohen also noted that even with significant engineering efforts to improve upon ethereum’s limitations, the network can only support roughly twice the transaction throughput of bitcoin.

This poor performance is due to the fact that Solidity and the EVM are a crap platform with hardly any work done on trivial engineering problems to make things better.

Cohen emphasized that even with large constant factor performance, such as a tenfold increase in capacity, the idea of a “world computer” would always remain a delusion.

He made it clear that he was not mocking Ethereum, but pointed out that this planned change could be easily forgotten as if it never happened.

Instead, Ethereum’s development managed to make the whole thing more centralized, exacerbating their MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) problem.

Even the sharding plan (also a bad idea) seems to have been quietly abandoned in favor of ZK rollups and proof of stake, a reasonable plan but still only a plan.

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Filed under: Bitcoin - @ May 6, 2023 3:55 pm