“Ethereum Died. It Just Hasn’t Been Buried Yet,” Asserts Max Keiser

In yet another scathing attack, Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser has taken aim at Ethereum in response to a proposed overhaul of its core protocol.

On Saturday, an early Bitcoin investor and senior advisor to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele referred to Ethereum as a failed project, dismissing any attempts to enhance the network as futile.

“Ethereum died. It just hasn’t been buried yet. In fact, it was stillborn. What an incredible waste of time & energy,” he stated.

His remarks came shortly after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praised Bitcoin’s simplicity and suggested adopting similar principles for Ethereum’s future.

Notably, Buterin, in a blog post published on May 3 titled “Simplifying the L1”, proposed a major shift toward streamlining Ethereum’s Layer 1 architecture. Drawing inspiration from Bitcoin’s minimalism, Buterin emphasized that Ethereum’s increasing complexity risks bugs, inflates maintenance costs, and narrows the pool of developers who can actively engage with the protocol.

Among the proposed changes is a transition from the current Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a RISC-V-based virtual machine, a move he claimed could boost performance, particularly in zero-knowledge proofs, by up to 100 times. The blog also advocated for sharing protocol components such as serialization formats and erasure codes across Ethereum layers to reduce redundancy. Importantly, Buterin pledged a phased rollout that ensures backward compatibility for existing smart contracts.

“Keeping the protocol simple brings a number of benefits that are key to Bitcoin or Ethereum being a credibly neutral and globally trusted base layer,” he wrote, citing easier governance, reduced bug risk, and lower costs for new infrastructure as reasons for the shift.

Keiser, however, was unimpressed with his condemnation, which reignited the long-running feud between Ethereum advocates and Bitcoin maximalists. However, supporters of Ethereum quickly fired back, with one user telling Keiser, “The only reason Bitcoiners are so salty about Ethereum is that people actually use Ethereum.” 

“ETH settles more value than BTC every day. ETH abstracts Blockchain technology. PoW wastes energy, is slow, and doesn’t scale. ETH solved miner incentives when BTC hasn’t. ETH is a store of value that generates yield. Assets are being tokenized on ETH.” Another noted.

That said, this isn’t Keiser’s first jab at Ethereum. Over the years, he’s dismissed the project as centralized, insecure, and lacking the monetary purity of Bitcoin. In 2022, he famously called Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake a “clown show” and labeled its developers “unqualified bureaucrats with keyboards.”

Last June, Keiser advised Argentina to reconsider its inclusion of Ethereum in its cryptocurrency strategy, labeling it as a “scam coin” and suggesting that embracing Bitcoin exclusively would better serve the country’s economic interests. Later in October, he predicted that Ethereum would “crash to zero” against Bitcoin, emphasizing that the crypto asset is considered an unregistered security in El Salvador.