Jack Dorsey Claims if 'You’re Building on Ethereum You Have at Least One, if Not Many, Single Points of Failure'

The internet entrepreneur and former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, claims if developers are building on Ethereum they have “at least one, if not many, single points of failure.” The statement was in response to Vitalik Buterin’s commentary concerning Elon Musk running Twitter.

Former Twitter CEO Criticizes Projects Building on Ethereum

Jack Dorsey doesn’t seem to be interested in anything to do with the Ethereum network, and last Friday he criticized the project. The Twitter conversation started when Ethereum’s co-creator, Vitalik Buterin, talked about Elon Musk running Twitter. “[I] don’t oppose Elon running Twitter (at least compared to status quo), but I do disagree with the more generalized enthusiasm for wealthy people/orgs hostile-takeovering social media firms,” Buterin tweeted. “That could easily go *very* wrong (eg. imagine an ethically-challenged foreign gov doing it).”

Following Buterin’s tweet, Dorsey replied “same,” and further said: “[I] don’t believe any individual or institutions should own social media, or more generally media companies. It should be an open and verifiable protocol. Everything is a step toward that.” After Dorsey’s statement, a project called the Deso protocol responded to his remarks. Deso explained that the Deso protocol’s vision for “the future of social media,” was similar to the former Twitter CEO’s vision.

In response, Dorsey explained, that in his opinion, the Ethereum protocol has one and maybe even many single points of failure. “If you’re building on [Ethereum] you have at least one, if not many, single points of failure and therefore not interesting to me,” Dorsey said.

Laser-Eyed Tribalism and Valid Web3 Criticism

The former social media chief executive’s opinion had all kinds of responses, some of which agreed with him and others that did not. “You really need to get away from the laser-eyed morons, Jack,” one individual said to Dorsey. “This is just embarrassing,” the person added.

Bitcoin proponent Jeff Booth, author of the book “The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future,” agreed with Dorsey’s criticism about Ethereum. “More entrepreneurs are going to figure this out the hard way over the coming years,” Booth said in response to Dorsey’s tweet. “Building on quicksand is a terrible long-term strategy,” Booth added. However, software developer and former Slock.it executive, Christoph Jentzsch, disagreed with Booth’s opinion.

“If you are building on the [Ethereum] protocol, no,” Jentzsch said. “If you are building with a sole dependency on Infura, Metamask and some others, then yes. [The] same is true for [Bitcoin],” Jentzsch added. The projects Jentzsch mentioned, and many other aspects of Web3 technology, have been disparaged a great deal and Dorsey himself has criticized Web3 hype in the past.

One specific review of Web3, published during the first week of January, by the cryptographer and computer security researcher, Moxie Marlinspike, explains in great detail a number of vulnerabilities tied to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized applications (dapps), and Web3 in general. Despite valid Web3 criticism, Dorsey’s tweet did not get into any specifics concerning so-called single points of failure. The tweet was very vague and simply noted that the former Twitter CEO was not interested in such projects.