According to Vitalik Buterin, "Efficiency and security are not separate problems. The question is always: how much security can you buy for every dollar per year that you spend on paying for it? If a system has too little security, you can add security at the cost of printing more coins, and at that point you've regained security by sacrificing on efficiency."
In a recent interview with Noah Smith, Vitalik Buterin made predictions for the future of the crypto industry and revealed his concerns over Bitcoin's long-term security.
Alluding to the collapse of Terra, he expressed his surprise that the crash did not happen sooner and claimed unsustainable models that tend to fall when the initial boom dies down are good at revealing the problems that remained hidden in them "since the beginning."
Vitalik believes that the crypto market will settle in a few years, with its volatility dropping to the levels observed in the gold and markets.
However, Vitalik harbored doubts about Bitcoin's long-term security due to two reasons, with the over-reliance on its fee structure for its security being the first one. Vitalik asserted that in the last five years, Bitcoin's fees have remained stagnant at $300K per day, a number that is incapable of securing a "multi-trillion dollar system."
The second reason is that a Proof-of-Work protocol provides considerably less security per dollar than its Proof-of-Stake counterpart, and unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin's transition to a PoS protocol seems highly infeasible.
Additionally, he defended the Ethereum Merge by stating that the PoW model consumes a significant amount of energy for mining, on top of requiring hundreds of thousands of tokens to be issued annually.
Furthermore, the PoS consensus mechanism provides quicker recovery in case of an attack: while the PoW model provides burning “all existing mining hardware” as the only response to a hack, the PoS model allows burning only the hacker's tokens, thus enabling the ecosystem to recover faster from the attack.
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