One of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates, Max Keiser, has once again criticized ethereum in the wake of the much-anticipated upgrade to the world’s second-largest crypto by market value.
“ETH Is A Useless Ponzi”
Max Keiser is not a fan of Ethereum, even after one of the most impressive technological feats in the blockchain space.
Kitco News Anchor and producer David Lin took to Twitter to note that ether’s supply has continued growing despite the recent transition from proof-of-work to a quicker and less energy-consuming proof-of-stake protocol. The Merge upgrade was supposed to bring net inflation to zero. However, this has not been the case. The ether supply change flipped positive, pouring cold water on the “ultra-sound money” narrative owing to a deflationary state enthusiasts envisioned after the Merge.
According to Lin, the circulating supply of ethereum was supposed to be capped at 120.6 million ethers on the day of the upgrade but has since risen beyond 122 million ETHs.
This all begs the question: Did the Merge fail to live up to its promises? Long-time Ethereum critic Max Keiser suggests it failed. Keiser added his two cents in response to Lin, claiming more premine is being dumped on the market. He went on to call ethereum a “useless, centralized, Ponzi scheme”.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the increasing ether supply, despite the switch to PoS, is stemming from lower transaction fees. Data from ultrasound.money shows that ether’s supply has grown by 4,278.88 ETH since the Merge went live five days ago. This is still considerably lower than the ETH distributed daily to miners and validators before the upgrade.
While Ethereum’s supply has continued expanding post-Merge, the token’s issuance rate has decreased significantly.
Critics Abound
Nonetheless, like Keiser, not everyone is buying into the Ethereum PoS hype. Prominent Chinese miner Chandler Guo, for instance, revealed in the lead-up to the Merge that he would launch a fork of the old Ethereum PoW chain. Guo’s ETHPOW token and others like it have garnered moderate traction among some community members.
Moreover, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson took issue with Ethereum’s PoS after Kraken announced that unstaking of the ETH locked is not allowed until the next Shanghai upgrade — which is expected approximately six months after the Merge.
Hoskinson noted in a different tweet that stakers on Cardano’s PoS protocol are ordinary people who don’t have to be healthy to participate in staking on the network. He believes this is the “philosophical” difference between Cardano and Ethereum.