The CEO of Tesla and the “Dogefather” himself, Elon Musk announced a week ago on his Twitter account that he collaborated with Dogecoin developers to improve its efficiency and enhance its fundamentals. Musk proposed increasing the size of the blockchain which he believes can improve speed and scaling which places it among the top five major cryptocurrencies.
Contrary to Musks’ beliefs, Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum pointed out the faults with Musk’s plan and stated the drawbacks and limitations with the proposal.
Using one of Musk’s many tweets, Buterin shared his thoughts on a blog post regarding the drawbacks of the plan. He pointed out that speeding block times, and increasing the block size will compromise the fundamental properties of blockchain i.e decentralization. By doing so, Musk will go against the concept of blockchain.
Buterin explained the matter with decentralization as a means to reduce network failures and security risks. He pointed out that Dogecoin holders will have a hard time running full nodes if the block size was to be increased. A culture of users verifying the blockchain can fend against malevolent attacks.
The co-founder of Ethereum elaborated further on the matter stating the more nodes a community of users run, the safer the blockchain will be as a whole from the threat of coordinated attacks. In a situation where only a handful of runners validate the network, the chances of attacks will surely increase.
To prevent such issues, Buterin advised maximizing the number of users to run a full node and ensuring node operation remains consistent with consumer hardware.
Buterin regarded Musk’s plans as impractical since the matters cannot be carried out without ZK-SNARKS or sharding technologies, something Musk left out in the proposal.
Buterin concluded his note, stating improving Dogecoin without sacrificing decentralization will take a lot of work, but it is vital for improving the cryptocurrency.
