Analyzing Vitalik Buterin's Statement About Cryptos that are "Centralized Piles of Trash"

Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, spoke at the Blockchain Connect Conference in January about Casper CBC and Ethereum 2.0, but also criticized blockchains that boast their speed, calling them "Centralized piles of trash."

At the Blockchain Connect Conference in San Francisco, the audience asked Vitalik whether CBC Casper was being designed with any transaction throughput goals in mind, hinting at proof-of-work's notoriously slow speed of transactions.

The conference was aimed at academics, boasting that it's a gathering of the most "Authoritative blockchain professors around the world."

In response, the Ethereum co-founder took aim at other blockchain projects that he labeled as "Bad" because of their focus on speed rather than safety, stating outright that such projects are centralized.

"There are honestly a lot of bad crypto projects that are trying to claim 'oh because we use fancy BFT , we can have 5,000 transactions a second and proof-of-work can only do 15,' Buterin said."

"There 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."

"A lot of the time, when a blockchain project claims: 'we can do 3,500 TPS because we have a different algorithm,' what we really mean is we are a centralized pile of trash that only works because we have seven nodes running the entire thing."

It is a strong statement from Buterin, who is taking aim at some of Ethereum's 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's mind, centralized.

"There are good ways of making a blockchain fast, and I would argue that the main good candidates are basically layer one scalability through sharding and layer two scalability through channels, plasma, and lightning network and ZK rollup," Buterin added.