“ETH is at best a science experiment,” Adamant Capital’s Tuur Demeester tweets Ethereum critique

The thread has since sparked debate between the Austrian economist and Vitalik Buterin. 

Economist and bitcoin investor, Tuur Demeester recently stated his belief that Ethereum is – at best – an expensive “science experiment.”

On Friday, the Adamant Capital founder published a lengthy Twitter thread, explaining his skepticism regarding the blockchain-based token.

As it turns out, there are several reasons for Demeester’s longstanding mistrust of Ethereum. While he noted that Ethereum proposes to offer the decentralisation, SoV, asset issuance and smart contracts Bitcoin does, he believes the two are opposites in terms of architecture and culture.

“I’ve followed Ethereum since 2014 & feel a responsibility to share my concerns. IMO contrary to its marketing, ETH is at best a science experiment. It’s now valued at $13B, which I think is still too high.” Demeester wrote.

He even retraced the roots of his stance on ETH, recalling the hangout he held with the Ethereum founder, Joe Lubin, in which he asked how the ETH network would be scaled.

“We’re now 4.5 years later, and sharding is still a pipe dream.” the economist wrote.

In addition, Demeester criticised the scalability solution put forward by Ethereum Blockchain founder, Vitalik Buterin last year, which proposed to transform Ethereum from a Proof-of-Work concept (in which miners compete to solve a mathematical problem in order to win a block reward) to Proof-of-Stake, which substitutes the block reward with transaction fees, which are then afforded to miners with the highest wealth (Source: CCN).

Demeester argues that Proof of Stake is “not a new concept at all,” and that Proof-of-Work was previously implemented by Bitcoin after PoS was “deemed impractical because of censorship vulnerability.”

“Over the years, this has become a pattern in Ethereum’s culture: recycling old ideas while not properly referring to past research and having poor peer review standards. This is _not_ how science progresses.” he wrote.

Buterin has since published a rebuttal to Demeester’s thread on Reddit, in which he assured that scaling implementations are “on the way,” and that sharding is “definitely not at the pipe dream stage at this point.”

He’s also published his own rebuttal to Demeester’s rebuttal, defending the Proof-of-Stake model, which can be found here.

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