Nearly three years after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin openly criticized the Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow (S2F) pricing model, the model’s anonymous creator, PlanB, has fired back at Ethereum, describing the network as a “centralized premined shitcoin.”
In a recent message posted on social media, PlanB expressed his dissatisfaction with Ethereum, claiming the network has never looked worse. He argued that ETH qualifies as a “shitcoin” because it is centralized, premined, utilizing proof-of-stake (PoS) rather than proof-of-work (PoW), and because its supply schedule can be altered at will. Such characteristics, PlanB wrote, damage the broader cryptocurrency community and deserve public criticism and mockery.
PlanB’s comments are widely seen as a retaliation to earlier remarks made by Vitalik Buterin in June 2022. At the time, Buterin mocked PlanB’s Stock-to-Flow model as “harmful,” accusing it of providing investors with a misleading sense of certainty that prices would always keep rising. The S2F model aims to predict Bitcoin’s value using the ratio between existing coins and newly issued coins from mining.
Now, with Ethereum struggling to gain price momentum and the Ethereum Foundation facing criticism for ongoing token sell-offs, PlanB seized the opportunity to return fire. He emphasized Ethereum’s flexible supply and monetary policies, and particularly the “premine” distribution model that allowed the Ethereum Foundation ample supply to periodically dump tokens onto the market. These characteristics, he argued, constitute significant “red flags” for investors.
PlanB also maintained that Ethereum has consistently failed to outperform Bitcoin. He cautioned investors about Ethereum’s financial model, stating that having no fixed monetary policy undermines the credibility of the project and contributes to instability.
This exchange highlights the sharp ideological divides within the cryptocurrency community, particularly the ongoing dispute over consensus mechanisms and economic models. It further underscores growing tensions in the crypto landscape regarding decentralization and token distribution policies, issues that have persistently defined the debate between Bitcoin and Ethereum proponents.
