• Vitalik Buterin criticizes Bitcoin’s “centralized middlemen” and defends Ethereum community’s pursuit of decentralization
• Buterin proposes to create a bridge to change BTC to ETH and vice versa in a trustless and unmediated way. 

Vitalik Buterin was at the centre of a discussion on the present and future of the two main cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and Ethereum. The debate was initiated on Twitter by the user “Danger”. The user affirmed that both cryptocurrencies are on the same path and emphasized that Bitcoin and Ethereum not only share values and principles, but also objectives. In that sense, he urged the users of these cryptocurrencies and their community to agree and work accordingly:

Vitalik Buterin founded Bitcoin Magazine. I think this fact is important for both Bitcoiners and Etherians to digest. The core values that drive Ethereum and Bitcoin are not all that different — and the end goals are the same.

Immediately, the publication received a response from the community of both cryptocurrencies. For example, Dan Hedl, co-founder of Zero Block, responded that Buterin has attempted to “destroy Bitcoin”.  Hedl expanded his commentary upon receiving a response from Buterin, and outlined 4 points that contributed to what he called the destruction of Bitcoin or at least harmed the network in his opinion. His argument is mainly centered on Buterin’s support, according to Hedl, for the Bitcoin Cash hard fork:

– Marginalizing/persecuting Bitcoiners by calling them “maximalists”

– Trying to undermine confidence in the core dev teams, roadmap, and feature set

– Supporting the fork attack called bcash

– False equivalency attacks calling bitcoin “effectively premined”

However, Buterin rejected Hedl’s statements. The conversation continued when Héctor Cárdenas, founder of the website CriptoNoticias, responded that although Buterin may still be following a Bitcoiner, the cryptocurrencies share no common objectives. Cárdenas said the Ethereum is in fact “prolonging the legacy financial system” with the DeFi sector. This sector allows users to take out loans, acquire debt and access other services offered by traditional banks, but using Ethereum’s platform and smart contracts. Buterin established the opposite:

I really and truly think it’s the opposite. BTC people seem happy to have lots of centralized middlemen (bitmex, tether, liquid….) and it’s the ETH community that’s trying to decentralize these functions with smart contract constructions.

A bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum

Although it was impossible to reach a consensus on the similarities that could exist between Bitcoin and the Ethereum and how both projects could work to their mutual benefit, Buterin made a proposal. The co-creator of Ethereum has stated that he wants to build a bridge between BTC and ETH. According to Buterin, it is “shameful” that there is no mechanism to make swaps between the two cryptocurrencies. Buterin proposed the creation of a decentralized exchange to resolve the issue:

We should put resources toward a proper (trustless, serverless, maximally Uniswap-like UX) ETH <-> BTC decentralized exchange. It’s embarrassing that we still can’t easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin and Ethereum share the general feeling of the market. BTC has a price of $8,740 with a loss of 8.79%, while the ETH has a price of $189 with a loss of 9.86% in the last 24 hours.

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