Ethereum Co-Founder Shares His Thoughts On Problematic DOGE Scalability Claims Of Tesla CEO

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, offered some comprehensive thoughts in a blog post he published on May 23 on the scalability problem. A part of the post is a rebuttal of the claims of Elon Musk on speeding up the Dogecoin network by just simply increasing the parameters of the protocol.

Buterin Makes the Record Straight

Buterin started the post by posing a question on how far scalability of Blockchain can be pushed before addressing the tweet Elon Musk put up on increasing the parameters of the Dogecoin network. After citing the complications of compromises and centralization of the technology, he mentioned that some important [non-obvious] factors could affect scaling.

Buterin dispute that the ability of regulators to run a node is pivotal to the decentralization of Blockchain. He mentioned a conspicuous example of how some influential groups on the network could change the parameters of the protocols if they wish, just at the cost of regular users.

What is inhibiting this from happening in the regular users who makes the network decentralized and keep it so. Put differently. The users running nodes are the fortification against the potential malicious actors taking over the network. He went on to analyze and describe how the regular users in the roles they play in the system are preventing malicious actors in other ways from executing attacks on the network.

He says the ultimate and optimal solution to this issue is to increase optimally the number of users that can run a full node. For this to happen, there must be considerations of storage, bandwidth, and computation.

Ethereum is Consumed with Achieving Scalability with ETH 2.0

ETH 2.0 has also been working on scaling the network as its popularity is rising with the increase in the growth of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi).

One of the most anticipated solutions to the scaling problem that can be introduced to the network is Sharding. Currently, Rollups has been introduced by Ethereum, which will be taken over by Sharding.

Scalability has been a crucial issue that needs to be addressed as blockchain technology, and applications expand, with the gas fees unbearably high in recent months. Buterin, however, mentioned storage as the deepest concern for the core developers. It is called state expiry and statelessness technically.

For sharding, Buterin mentioned that it could basically get around the limitations mentioned above. Ethereum plans to make use of quadratic sharding, and he said the ideal number of shards needed would be about a hundred.

In conclusion, he said though, there are upsides and downsides to the available solutions, the best of them all still seem to be Sharding.