Vitalik Buterin Calls Bitcoin Maximalist Michael Saylor A 'Total Clown'

Ethereum ETH/USD co-founder Vitalik Buterin took a shot at Bitcoin maximalists, including MicroStrategy Corporation MSTR CEO Michael Saylor.

What Happened: Buterin made his comments on Twitter, in response to Saylor’s comments on Ethereum.

Vitalik said in response to Saylor’s interview with the “Not Investment Advice” podcast featuring Trung Phan, Jack Butcher, and Bilal Zaidi. “Why do maximalists keep picking heroes that turn out to be total clowns?”

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Why It Matters: On who controls Ethereum, Saylor said it was a “software company” and that Ethereum “is an equity and they’ve sold it to the general public.”

Saylor brought up a number of issues with Ethereum in the interview, citing prior hard forks that “make materially different changes to the monetary policy” and the upcoming Merge or the second-largest coin’s shift to a proof-of-stake protocol. 

Saylor said hard forks are mandatory so Ethereum is not a “decentralized network" and dismissed the idea that it was a commodity as well.

“No reasonable person that understands the law or ethics could conclude that Ethereum is a commodity.” 

He also recommended listeners of the podcast read Laura Shin’s book “The Cryptopians," which touches on Ethereum and its rise in the early years of the cryptocurrency boom and digs particularly deep into the 2016 DAO hack.

The DAO hack had raised $150 million through a token sale but was hacked due to vulnerabilities in its code. Saylor called the Ethereum hard fork that addressed the DAO hack an “ethical lapse.”

MicroStrategy is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, with 129,698 BTC on its treasury worth $3.02 billion. Last year, Saylor had taken a more conciliatory approach to Ethereum and had said there was a “place for everybody.”

Price Action: At press time, over 24 hours, Ethereum traded 0.1% higher at $1679.94, Bitcoin traded 0.5% lower at $23,178.35. On Friday, MicroStrategy shares closed 3.75% lower at $286.06 in the after-hours trading, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

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Photo by MicroStrategy via Wikimedia and Alexey Smyshlyaev in Shutterstock