“Pro-tip: if there’s a long-established tradition of people debating A vs B based on deep arguments touching on math, economics and moral philosophy, and you come along saying ‘B is dumb because of a one-line technicality involving definitions’, you’re probably wrong,” tweeted the Ethereum founder.

It is worth noting that the Byzantine Generals Problem plagues several systems that require consensus to operate, including finance. By definition, it presents itself where multiple actors must agree for a system to work, but these actors can not trust each other.

Notably, Bitcoin is touted as the first to tackle this issue using an immutable public ledger, cryptography, and the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work system disincentivizing bad actors. Consequently, people can safely conduct transactions as they trust the blockchain without needing to trust each other or a central authority susceptible to corruption in traditional finance.

Since Bitcoin’s creation, other consensus models have also been created to solve this problem, replacing miners with validators who stake their crypto to validate transactions on the network and risk losing them for trying to deceive the system. While the Proof-of-Stake and Delegated Proof-of-Stake models have proven to be less energy-intensive, Bitcoin maximalists like Song believe none offers the same level of security as Bitcoin.

It is worth noting that Ethereum, Buterin’s brainchild, is scheduled to migrate to PoS later this year in the face of rising energy and scalability concerns. The long-anticipated merge is billed to tackle issues of high transaction cost and scalability plaguing the DeFi King.

The timeline for the merge has faced a slight delay with the announcement of the Gray Glacier upgrade, which delays the difficulty bomb (which will encourage miners to move to PoS) by 100 days.

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