David Schwartz compared crypto miners in the Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystem akin to shareholders of eBay, which he believes makes BTC and ETH a security as well.
David Schwartz, the chief technical officer of Ripple, didn’t take Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s dig on XRP very kindly. In a discussion that started around the recent $30,000 limit imposed by the Ontario crypto exchange on altcoins purchases barring Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Buterin, in a quoted response to a tweet, lauded the Ethereum community’s pushback against regulations that privilege ETH over other legitimate cryptocurrencies. David Hoffman, the founder of decentralized media and education platform Bankless.eth responded to Buterin and said that he wouldn’t have minded if they had restricted XRP.
XRP already lost their right to protection when they tried to throw us under the bus as "China-controlled" imo:https://t.co/t6cbMtjsEV
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 17, 2022
Buterin joined on the XRP bashing claiming they lost their right to protection when they tried to “throw us under the bus as China-controlled.” The response from Buterin created a storm among XRP followers on Twitter, and the debate was later joined by Ripple CTO David Schwartz himself.
Buterin was referring to Ripple’s defense in their ongoing court battle against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where they claimed XRP shouldn’t be deemed as security since Ethereum and Bitcoin are similar in nature and even called the top two cryptocurrencies as Chinese controlled. Ripple is fighting a security lawsuit from the SEC over the unlicensed sale and issuance of XRP tokens.
Schwartz reiterated Ripple’s earlier claims of ETH and BTC being security and compared miners in the ecosystem akin to shareholders of eBay. He said:
“I do think it’s perfectly fair to analogize miners in PoW systems to stockholders in companies. Just as eBay’s stockholders earn from the residual friction between buyers and sellers that eBay does not remove, so do miners in ETH and BTC.”
Schwartz concluded his tweet with a question to Buterin, asking him whether the security debate should be settled by the government or the market.
Do you think this debate should be settled by the government or the market, @VitalikButerin? This quotation wasn't pulled from some attempt by Ripple to get the government to regulate ETH, was it?
— (@JoelKatz) August 18, 2022
Ethereum’s security status became a hot topic during the ongoing lawsuit proceedings, where Ripple has claimed that the SEC has a clear bias against them and it favored Ethereum. In an interview in 2021, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse claimed that SEC helped Ethereum to overtake XRP as the No.2 crypto.
Related: Alchemy and Infura block access to Tornado Cash as Vitalik Buterin weighs in on debate
The security status of cryptocurrencies has been a long-driven debate due to a lack of regulatory guidelines. The majority of regulators around the globe consider Bitcoin as an asset, while there is still an ongoing debate over the status of Ethereum due to the pre-mine and initial coin offerings (ICO).
