{"id":97920,"date":"2019-02-08T13:50:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T21:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/?p=97920"},"modified":"2026-04-26T14:54:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T13:54:58","slug":"analyzing-vitalik-buterins-statement-about-cryptos-centralized-piles-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/analyzing-vitalik-buterins-statement-about-cryptos-centralized-piles-trash\/","title":{"rendered":"Analyzing Vitalik Buterin’s Statement About Cryptos that are “Centralized Piles of Trash”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, spoke at the Blockchain Connect Conference<\/a> in January about Casper CBC and Ethereum 2.0, but also criticized blockchains that boast their speed, calling them \u201ccentralized piles of trash” at the Blockchain Connect Conference in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

The audience asked Vitalik whether CBC Casper was being designed with any transaction throughput goals in mind, hinting at proof-of-work\u2019s notoriously slow speed of transactions.<\/p>\n

The conference was aimed at academics, boasting that it's a gathering of the most “authoritative blockchain professors around the world.”<\/p>\n

In response, the Ethereum<\/a> co-founder took aim at other blockchain projects that he labeled as \u201cbad\u201d because of their focus on speed rather than safety, stating outright that such projects are centralized.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are honestly a lot of bad crypto projects that are trying to claim \u2018oh because we use fancy BFT [Byzantine Fault Tolerance], we can have 5,000 transactions a second and proof-of-work can only do 15,\u2019 Buterin said<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This implicitly calls attention to blockchains such as EOS<\/a>, TRON<\/a>, and NEO<\/a>, which either use delegated proof-of-work or delegated Byzantine Faul Tolerance (dBFT). These projects use less than 30 nodes, with NEO having the fewest nodes at 7.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of horrible misconceptions inside of that because the purpose of a consensus algorithm is not to make a blockchain fast. The purpose of a consensus algorithm is to keep a blockchain safe.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because of how proof-of-work works, even if the number of nodes is increased, the speed at which transactions processed tend to stay the same, or even decrease. This is because miners are searching for the solution for the next block in parallel. When network propagation time, the time it takes for a message to travel through a network, is added, it takes even longer.<\/p>\n

Consequently, only a tiny amount of the computing power used for mining is actually used in processing transactions. Overall, these bottlenecks make it difficult to increase throughput in a proof-of-work model.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the time, when a blockchain project claims: \u2018we can do 3,500 TPS (transactions per second) because we have a different algorithm,\u2019 what we really mean is we are a centralized pile of trash that only works because we have seven nodes running the entire thing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is a strong statement from Buterin, who is taking aim at some of Ethereum\u2019s competition which is not using a proof-of-work consensus. Thus, these projects are able to achieve impressing-sounding transaction throughput because these networks are, in Buterin\u2019s mind, centralized. Watch Vitalik Buterin's full talk below:<\/p>\n