On September 1, Vitalik Buterin conducted an interview with the economics author Noah Smith and the co-founder of Ethereum spoke an awful lot about Bitcoin and the network’s long-term security. Buterin also discussed the crypto economy’s crash and said he was “surprised that the crash did not happen earlier.”
Buterin: Bitcoin Is ‘Not Succeeding at Getting the Level of Fee Revenue Required to Secure What Could Be a Multi-Trillion-Dollar System’
Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently did an interview with the economics author Noah Smith and Buterin had a lot to say about the current state of crypto. Smith first asked Buterin about his thoughts about the recent crypto crash and Buterin said he thought that it would have crashed sooner.
“I was surprised that the crash did not happen earlier,” Buterin said during the interview. “Normally crypto bubbles last around 6-9 months after surpassing the previous top, after which the rapid drop comes pretty quickly. This time, the bull market lasted nearly one and a half years,” the developer added.
Buterin also talked a great deal about the Bitcoin (BTC) network and The Merge, Ethereum’s highly anticipated transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). He claims Bitcoin is not cutting it when it comes to fee revenue from block subsidies.
“In the long term, Bitcoin security is going to come entirely from fees, and Bitcoin is just not succeeding at getting the level of fee revenue required to secure what could be a multi-trillion-dollar system,” Buterin said.
When Smith asked Buterin about Bitcoin’s energy usage, the Ethereum co-founder noted that PoS will not only reduce harm to the environment, it’s also about keeping the blockchain secure.
“A consensus system that needlessly costs huge amounts of electricity is not just bad for the environment, it also requires issuing hundreds of thousands of BTC or ETH every year,” Buterin stressed. “Eventually, of course, the issuance will decrease to near-zero, at which point that will stop being an issue, but then Bitcoin will start to deal with another issue: how to make sure that it stays secure.” Buterin added:
And these security motivations are also a really important driver behind Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake.
