On the first of January, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a series of tweets of what he has said and written over the past 10 years.
Happy new year!
Today, a mini-tweetstorm of some of the things I’ve said and written over the past decade, and what I think about those subjects today.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 1, 2022
Vitalik Buterin’s tweets on Bitcoin
This is a long list of his tweets on many different topics, comparing his current view with the historical one.
The first tweet is about Bitcoin, and is from 2013 (when Ethereum did not yet exist).
According to Vitalik, the key advantage of Bitcoin is not the limit of 21 million BTC issuable, as Ethereum has no such limit, but the fact that it is international and censorship-resistant.
In the same tweet he already speculated that stablecoins would be successful.
Today, he says that the adoption of cryptocurrencies is now high, as predicted in 2013, and that the adoption of stablecoins is also elevated. Indeed, he says that there are many businesses using USDT, even though these tokens may suffer from issues with the underlying assets.
The second is the relationship between Bitcoin and states, which cannot make it disappear, but may not let it prosper.
Ethereum, PoS and transactions
The third tweet is very interesting, because it concerned his predictions, which turned out to be completely wrong, about the timing for the introduction of Proof-of-Stake on Ethereum.
He predicted that PoS would be introduced in a couple of years, but it has been almost seven years and it still hasn’t been introduced.
The fourth is the concept of the need for low transaction costs, which he still agrees with 100%. However, the current transaction cost on the Ethereum blockchain is still very high, so a lot of work will still be needed to bring it down to the 5 cents ceiling assumed in 2017.
The fifth one is about the idea of sharding, which is still valid today, while the sixth one is again about PoS as an alternative to PoW.
Buterin disappointed by Bitcoin Cash
The ninth is about his admission of the disappointment of Bitcoin Cash, on which he counted a lot in 2017, but which instead turned out to be a totally marginal project and not able to evolve Bitcoin.
His comment on the twelfth post dedicated to stablecoins is interesting.
Buterin in fact states that he is more pessimistic today than in 2014, mainly because of the slow progress in the introduction of PoS, and the possible collapse of the USD.
In conclusion, he says that he has more often been right about abstract issues related to the development of technology, rather than concrete problems related to the development itself. But he also says he now has a deeper appreciation of the need for even greater simplicity than he previously thought.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/01/03/tweet-vitalik-buterin-2013-bitcoin-bch/