Underneath the current bull rally, which has led to new yearly highs for Bitcoin and Ethereum, another heated spat is taking place in the ever-active Twitter-sphere. Ether supporters or “Ethereans,” as they say, clash their heads with bitcoin maximalists.
None other than Vitalik Buterin is in the middle of the current conundrum, and the topic of the current argument has been the circulating supply of ETH.
Ethereum’s transaction has skyrocketed exponentially in the past week, leading to a point that Bitcoin proponents have started to accuse Ethereum ‘s ecosystem of being a hotbed of various Ponzi schemes.
A popular Bitcoin maximalist, Udi Wertheimer brought an old incident into the picture from August 2010, when a bug in BTC’s client allowed a specific node to validate an invalid block containing around 92,233,720,368 Bitcoins. Although back then the problem was solved in no-time, Wertheimer, took his shot at Ethereum by stating,
“If it happened in Ethereum, no one would know! Maybe it already happened!”
With the fire already ignited, other Bitcoin maximalists jumped on board and Pierre Rochard indicated the fact that the current supply of Ethereum is actually not known.
With the BTC community piling up on Ethereum’s supposedly shorting-coming, Vitalik Buterin responded. The Ethereum Co-Founder stated,
Because we roughly know what it is according to the protocol rules, and we know that there's so many people running different implementations that a bug would get caught?
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 8, 2020
Now, in hindsight, his response missed putting a nail in the coffin of this argument, as quoting “roughly” was interpreted as in a suspicious manner as well.
However, a software developer from MakerDao, Marc-André Dumas, pictured a bit of clarity in support of Ethereum. Responding to Rochard on Twitter, Dumas suggested after running his code on a quick script to compute the total eth supply, the result was pretty close to the number exhibited by etherscan.io.
Multiple metrics platforms such as Messari, Coingecko, and CoinMarketCap were all suggesting a similar circulating supply that was around 112,000,0000.
Hence, for the time being, the debate seems to be over, but it is never really over between the community members of Ethereum and Bitcoin.