Ethereum could have saved a lot of pain and effort by implementing Snow White, Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson tweeted to one of Vitalik Buterin’s posts. Hoskinson previously brought up the matter, arguing that Elaine Shi’s Snow White Proof-of-Stake [PoS] consensus will make Ethereum 2.0 much superior.
But what exactly is this Snow White and most importantly why did the Ethereum founder choose to ignore it?
Elaine Shi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, an institution known for being one of the most cutting-edge blockchain centers in the US.
In 2016, she co-authored a paper on Snow White PoS consensus which it claimed would “provides the first formal, end-to-end proof of a Proof-of-Stake system in a completely decentralized, open-participation network” where nodes can join at any time even after the system has been established.
Hoskinson praised the protocol calling it great and a competitor to ‘Ouroboros’ [Cardano PoS consensus].
My biggest problem is that he hasn’t divided and conquered. Like, for example, in the development of Casper — Casper, Vitalik could have gone to Cornell and went to Elaine Shi. And back in 2016, Elaine Shi came up with this, so he could have very easily gone there and said, Here is a $5 million grant, go develop Casper.
This would, in Hoskinson’s opinion, solve the “minimal intellectual rigor” that was allegedly present during the development of Ethereum.
Ethereum Founder Had Other Plans
According to Hoskinson, Buterin could have hired eminent researchers who were passionate about the issue to develop a strong consensus algorithm for him, freeing him up to concentrate on building the rest of the company and its technologies.
Hoskinson claimed Buterin had different plans.
“Now he wanted to develop Casper himself, which meant he divided his time between being a CEO and being an engineer and a scientist. And he tried to go and develop something that he had no native experience in and had to learn the whole theory himself, even if he’s a genius. It takes time.”
Hoskinson came to the conclusion that Ethereum could have saved a lot of time and effort by building on the solid foundation already in place rather than starting from scratch, which would have also eliminated the project’s ongoing delays.