Vitalik Buterin Goes on 'Tweet Storm' About Ethereum's Casper

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin launched a "Tweet storm," Aug. 16, presumably to succinctly explain the Casper protocol to crypto-enthusiasts while dismissing rumors and misconceptions.

Erin kicked off his tweet storm at the beginning when Ethereum was in its 2014 ideation states.

Listing the protocol's achievements, Buterin noted the threat of "Long-range attacks" as a point of discussion with Zamfir.

At this point, Zamfir's research set the groundwork for Casper and its Friendly Finality Gadget update, which could overlay over any PoS system to add finality guarantees.

I eventually simplified the minimal slashing conditions down from four to two, and from there came Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget, which is designed to be usable as an overlay on top of any PoW or PoS or other blockchain to add finality guarantees.

Following endless arguments, Zamfir and Buterin reached success in their respective frameworks, with the latter addressing the "Huge progress" made by FFG in regard to the Ethereum blockchain.

The decision to implement FFG as a contract made some things easier, but it made other things harder, and it also meant that the eventual switch from EVM to EWASM, and single-chain Casper to sharded Casper, would be harder.

In June 2018, we made the fateful decision to scrap "Hybrid Casper FFG as a contract", and instead pursue full Casper as an independent chain, designed in such a way that integrating sharding would be much easier.

Not one to back down, Buterin shared that the team focused its research efforts on a compatible hybrid solution in sync with the evolution of the Ethereum blockchain.

Concluding his tweet storm, Buterin highlighted several conversations with Zamfir about Leslie Lamport's 99 percent Byzantine-fault-tolerant algorithms, GHOST-based fork choices and validation rules.