Is there “no value for ETH in Ethereum as of today”? Vitalik Buterin speaks up

Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, fought back against criticism related to ETH after a reporter called it ‘intrinsically worthless’. The coin was at $190 position for the last few days but on Tuesday it slipped further down, taking ETH’s 2018’s low even lower. Currently, the coin is trading at $ 177.42, as it slid 9.5 % against the U.S. dollar. It marks a new low for Ethereum (ETH) in 2018 for ETH/USD, and overall, a fourteen month-low.

Buterin’s comment was in response to an excerpt by cryptocurrency reporter Matthew De Silva, which was retweeted by Coin Desk’s managing director for Europe and Asia, Wong Joon Ian. The excerpt reads, “Still, Buterin was the one who helped launch a network with tokens that he admitted are intrinsically worthless, at least for now. Why didn’t he wait to devise a platform with an equitable distribution model and a proven use case, aside for speculation?” The criticism comes from the response Buterin gave after Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jeremy Rubin wrote the Tech Crunch article on Ethereum – ‘Collapse of ETH is inevitable’.

Responding to the criticism, Buterin wrote, “So I realized that the argument that “there’s no value for ETH in ethereum as of today” is even wronger than I thought.” Further responding to the claims that ETH is irrelevant on the Ethereum network, he tweeted, “The reason is that as of today, abstraction is not even implemented in ethereum. There are clear efficiency advantages to using ETH as a means of paying for gas: it’s already baked into the protocol, zero gas cost to pay for gas (so no “tax tax”), network protocol supports it…”

Pure ? from @matthewde_silva pic.twitter.com/vhVz7TT002

— Wong Joon Ian (@joonian) September 11, 2018

Vitalik Buterin ends it with, “It’s not fair to rely on hypothetical future features to argue against something, and not admit *planned* future features as arguments in its favor.”

Last time, when TechCrunch published the article – ‘collapse of ETH is inevitable’, Vitalik revealed two proposals that could make improve Ethereum. The first one being, “Instead of paying for Gas in ETH, we could make every BuzzwordCoin transaction deposit a small amount of BuzzwordCoin directly to the block’s miner’s address to pay for the contract’s execution. Paying for Gas in a non-ETH asset is sometimes referred to as economic abstraction in the Ethereum community.”

Another one is, “…average gas usage is targeted to 50% of a (2x higher than today) gas limit, using a self-adjusting minimum transaction fee to do the targeting, where the minimum fee gets burned.” The fee will be charged to the block proposer, who can charge fees in spankchain tokens or other ERC20. However, it will still be the block proposer’s responsibility to come up with the “ETH to pay the minfee.”

Although Ethereum is currently languishing in its worst period this year, the crypto world should wait to see how the network’s ‘planned future features’ work out before dismissing the entire enterprise.

See also:

Ethereum lacks immutability feature: Litecoin founder Charlie Lee
Charles Hoskinson opines about Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin & his ‘ceiling in sight’ view

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