Bran Cohen, best known every bit author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, has responded to some of Vitalik Buterin's opinions about the land of engineering around cryptocurrencies.

On Nov. 25, Cohen, as well the current CEO of the Chia network, explained in a Twitter thread why he considers many of Vitalik's opinions in his Nov. 22 blog mail addressing the so-called "hard problems in cryptocurrency," to exist "wrong-headed."

Sharding is not the simply option

Cohen started out by taking a few stabs at Vitalik'due south views on sharding and blockchain scalability, where the Ethereum co-founder points out that fully sharded blockchains still have not been seen in action, besides the partially sharded Zilliqa, which recently started running.

Sharding is non the only option to solve blockchain scalability, Cohen wrote. He points to payment channel networks, which according to him, are much "more than highly-seasoned" and are becoming "a real thing." He adds:

"What Ethereum's proposing for sharding further breaks this by substantially requiring miners to take all the shards, which is... non sharding, information technology's just further redefining 'full node' to mean less than it did earlier."

ASIC-resistant proof of work

Ethereum settled on its ASIC-resistant proof of piece of work (Prisoner of war) algorithm Ethash in early on 2022, which according to Vitalik has proven remarkably successful at resisting ASIC. However, Vitalik'southward view on ASIC-resistant Prisoner of war is that in that location is a growing consensus that ASIC-resistant algorithms have a limited lifespan, and that ASIC resistance has downsides every bit they make 51% attacks cheaper.

Cohen seems to agree and calls ASIC-resistant Pow both a piping dream and a bad thought. Cohen claims that it is a much better idea to be ASIC-friendly, because "ASIC resistance only creates more centralization around manufacture when it inevitably fails."

Eco-friendly crypto mining

In July, Bram Cohen'due south San Francisco-based tech firm Chia Network released a green paper that describes an eco-friendly means of mining cryptocurrencies. Specifically, Chia proposed farming rather than mining to verify blockchains that issue cryptocurrencies, wherein proof-of-space and proof-of-fourth dimension take the identify of the proof-of-work (Pw) principle used to mine Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). The paper explained:

"Instead of using proofs of piece of work, Chia alternates proofs of infinite with verifiable delay functions. This results in a chain than in many aspects is like to Bitcoin, in item, equally in Bitcoin no synchronisation is needed and we tin prove rigorous security guarantees bold a sufficient fraction of the resource (space in Chia, computation in Bitcoin) is controlled by honest parties."