According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Blockstream CEO Adam Back has been reminded that Bitcoin was also invented by a person. Buterin revealed his moral conflicts in a popular Twitter conversation on May 17. Despite his support for decentralisation and democracy, the programmer confesses that he tends to agree with intellectual elites more than regular people on many policy matters.
Contradiction between my desire to be a positive-sum mediator figure that can be everyone's friend and my desire to stand strongly with good against evil those times when true evil is what we face.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 17, 2022
Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a fervent Bitcoin maximalist, responded by tweeting that he connected with “the plebs,” thereby dismissing the “master architect concept.”
as a sample of one #bitcoin'er i identify with the plebs, and systematically reject the confused central-planning of hubris-fueled self-proclaimed elites. i believe in bottom up, robust design bases that work, reject the master architect hypothesis: https://t.co/s9U6UZW1mJ
— Adam Back (@adam3us) May 17, 2022
Buterin was eager to point out to Bitcoin users that the original money is also a human-created social construct. According to Buterin, the fact that supporters of the cryptocurrency believe Satoshi Nakamoto’s protocol is ideal demonstrates that they do not genuinely reject the master architect concept.
This isn’t the first Twitter feud between Back and Buterin. They are the driving forces dividing Bitcoin maximalists and Ethereum advocates. When Buterin tweeted in 2019 that the famed bio fraud Theranos was “uncannily” Ethereum-like, Back criticised him for misrepresenting blockchain technology.
In 2020, the Blockstream CEO linked the second largest blockchain to a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, prompting Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to accuse him of spreading “tired old garbage.”
Back, who was named in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, is widely considered as the creator of Bitcoin. He has, however, refuted the charges.
