In a fresh Twitter tussle between Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin and Ripple’s chief technology officer (CTO) David Schwartz, it became a contentious debate over XRP.
While Ripple executives claim that the company has been unfairly treated by the SEC, Vitalik Buterin differed in his opinion in regard to the topic which further developed into a spat over XRP.
The latest feud began with a discussion of new regulatory changes in Canada with Ontario-based crypto exchanges. The involved exchanges are Bitbuy and Newton which recently put a 30,000 CAD limit on altcoins purchases which excluded (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
The discussion started a string of tweets in which Buterin took a dig at XRP which Schwartz also didn’t take very kindly. Buterin, in response to a tweet, lauded the Ethereum community’s pushback against regulations that privileged ETH over other cryptocurrencies.
On the other hand, the founder of decentralized media and education platform Bankless, David Hoffman responded to Buterin and said he wouldn’t have minded if they had restricted XRP.
Buterin immediately joined in on the XRP bashing and tweeted that “XRP already lost their right to protection when they tried to throw Ethereum under the bus as “China-controlled”. This statement created a storm among XRP followers on Twitter and later Schwartz hopped into the debate as well.
Buterin referred to Ripple’s defense in its ongoing court battle with SEC, in which it claimed XRP shouldn’t be deemed as security since Ether and Bitcoin are similar in nature. XRP in its defense even called the top two currencies Chinese-controlled.
Ripple is currently fighting a lawsuit from the SEC over the alleged unlicensed sale and issuance of the XRP token.
Schwartz even reiterated Ripple’s earlier claims that ETH and BTC are securities and compared miners in the ecosystem to shareholders of eBay.
He went on to say that he believes it’s perfectly fair to analogize miners in PoW systems to stockholders in companies. Similar to how eBay’s stockholders earn from the residual friction between buyers and sellers that eBay does not remove, so do miners in ETH and BTC.
He concluded the debate by posting a question to Buterin, asking him whether the government or the market should settle the security debate.
Ether’s potential status as security has become a hot topic during the ongoing lawsuit proceeding in which Ripple accused SEC of clear bias against them and favors Ethereum. In June, Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, expressed his dissatisfaction with SEC by saying that it has contradictory crypto regulations.
