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Defending the Throne! Bitcoin Godfather Adam Back: In my opinion, Ripple and Ethereum are both "Ponzi schemes".

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Defending the Throne! Bitcoin Godfather Adam Back: In my opinion, Ripple and Ethereum are both "Ponzi schemes".

Ethereum just celebrated its fifth birthday at the end of July, and with the launch of the final testnet, it is expected to upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 on schedule in November. Despite the ongoing celebrations, Adam Back, often referred to as the "father of Bitcoin," once again criticized Ethereum today (8/6), even going as far as calling it a "Ponzi scheme."

Mainstream Coins Under Fire

Adam Back, CEO of the well-known blockchain firm Blockstream, heavily criticized Ethereum on Twitter today, including many top-ranking altcoins, all categorized by Adam Back as fraudulent projects.

Layah Heilpern, a journalist from the foreign blockchain media Altcoin Buzz, received a reply from Adam Back in one of her tweets:

Bitconnect, Charles Ponzi, Ethereum, onecoin, Cardano, Ripple, Bernie Madoff, Stellar, Dan Larmer. These things all seem similar to me.

Both Charles Ponzi and Bernard Madoff are key figures in Ponzi schemes, with the latter even having the scheme named after him.

Bitconnect and OneCoin are well-known cryptocurrency scams. The founder of OneCoin, featured in previous anti-fraud topics, managed to raise 4 billion euros and then vanished in less than 3 years; Bitconnect reached a historical high of $463 in December 2017 and briefly held the eighth position in market capitalization.

October 2017 Market Cap Rankings (Source: coinmarketcap)

Ethereum Founder's Response

Adam Back likened mainstream cryptocurrencies like Ethereum to fraudulent projects, mentioning "Dan Larmer," likely referring to Dan Larimer, founder of Bitshares and Steem, currently the CTO of EOS, but misspelling his surname.

Heilpern asked again, "Do you really think Ethereum is a scam? Do you think infrastructure like DApps adds value to the whole ecosystem?" Adam Back responded:

The 70% pre-mine explains it all, Ripple or Ethereum could be considered larger-scale scams.

In response, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated:

Repeating these old arguments every day is becoming less and less useful. Ethereum is on the rise, with Proof of Stake (PoS), sharding technologies emerging, and scalability solutions like rollups within reach. They will operate synergistically through a large distributed ecosystem.

Not the First Time Targeting Ethereum

Adam Back introduced the Proof of Work (PoW) system Hashcash in 1997 to combat spam emails. PoW, referenced in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, has become the consensus mechanism for Bitcoin to this day. Besides Bitcoin, Adam Back seems to disapprove of any other project and has previously criticized Ethereum.

In a previous report, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin dismissed the Bitcoin price prediction model "Stock-to-Flow" as nonsense, to which Adam Back immediately responded regarding Ethereum's circulation mechanism:

When your altcoin's circulation is ill-defined and subject to adjustments based on strange ideas by certain code engineers, your token's value will naturally not match the Stock-to-Flow model.

Furthermore, in November last year, Adam Back drew a comparison between Ethereum and the medical company Theranos, claiming to have invented a "revolutionary blood-testing device," stating:

In reality, Theranos had several generations of medical devices and pushed engineering progress, but the management excessively and erroneously hyped their current technological status, similar to Ethereum.

In today's tweet, Adam Back emphasized once again: Most new projects actually originate from the Bitcoin ecosystem, so do not mistake the marketing hype of altcoins for innovation, as Bitcoin has no marketing budget.

When asked by journalist Heilpern if he would like to be interviewed on this matter, Adam Back did not provide further comments.