Ethereum [ETH] versus Cardano [ADA] battle round 2: Hoskinson responds on Reddit

On 13th August, Charles Hoskinson of Cardano and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum had another rebuttal session where Hoskinson finally took to Reddit to reply to Vitalik’s previously posted accusations. The ongoing altercation between the two Founders started last month when Buterin questioned the competency of Cardano’s Ouroboros protocol.

Charles Hoskinson’s tweet | Source: Twitter

After Cardano’s first rebuttal blog post, Buterin responded with an elaborate post on Reddit that said:

“They’re very clearly writing a hit piece, and not genuinely engaging with any of the actual tradeoffs in consensus design or trying to understand Casper, as I tried with Cardano here (notice how that Reddit post still has no answers).”

This was continued by Hoskinson after he replied back to Buterin’s post. There was a debate on sources available to explore more about Casper, the protocol used by Ethereum. Cardano claimed that the team could not find enough sources to understand Casper in its entirety.

Here, Buterin denied Cardano’s claim by saying that Casper has enough sources discussing the properties of the protocol, namely, Casper FFG paper and complete FFG mini-spec. Moreover, the sources contain details on key guarantees, such as safety, liveness along with computer-verified proof of Casper’s properties.

In his latest response, Hoskinson said that Cardano has mentioned all these sources in their rebuttal blog. He also clarified that the blog mentioned the lack of sources that carry a ‘self-contained’ description of Casper. Subsequently, Cardano could not find documents that provide proofs for all the relevant properties of Casper. Citing examples, he wrote:

“in the FFG whitepaper, Theorem 1 on safety is proven in page 4 for the static version of the protocol where the validator set is fixed. As a result the theorem is not a full proof of safety since the assumption that 2/3 of validators do not violate a slashing condition is only sensible for the period of time that validators have actually something at stake. In upcoming sections, protocol operations related to this are revisited (e.g., in Dynamic validator sets, Long Range Revisions), but no other formal theorem statement is made except for a sketch that is provided in section 4.1.”

Buterin, in his earlier response, marked Cardano’s rebuttal as ‘pedantry’. Hoskinson answered to the comment by debating that his team only asked for a full description of the protocol, which does not pass as pedantry. He also called the description of Casper unambiguous.

The first rebuttal blog published by Cardano was titled ‘How does Casper compare to Ouroboros?’ and was called by a ‘hit piece’ by the Ethereum’s Founder.