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Vitalik Buterin is taking to Twitter to defend Ethereums move to proof of stake.

The Ethereum co-founder took a shot at Swan Bitcoins managing editor Nick Payton, who argued Thursday that any cryptocurrency that powers a proof of stake blockchainwhich uses validators with pledged, or staked, assets to verify transactionsis a security.

The fact that you can vote on something to change its properties is proof that its a security, Payton said. The insult hits at a sore spot for a crypto industry that has for years battled with the Securities and Exchange Commissionand one that is particularly touchy for Ethereum investors, since the matter of whether or not ETH should be considered a security remains an open question.

Early Friday morning, Buterin called Paytons assertion a bare-faced lie.

It's amazing how some [proof-of-work] proponents just keep repeating the unmitigated bare-faced lie that [proof-of-stake] includes voting on protocol parameters (it doesn't, just like [proof-of-work] doesn't) and this so often just goes unchallenged, he said, adding, Nodes reject invalid blocks, in [proof-of-stake] and in [proof-of-work]. It's not hard.

Proof of work, which involves the participation of miners who devote large amounts of computing power to solve complex, mathematical problems, is currently how both Bitcoin and Ethereum validate transactions and secure their networks. Ethereum, however, is in the process of transitioning to proof of stake through a long-awaited update now known as the Merge.

In his defense of proof of stake, Buterin took his retort one step further with a tongue-in-cheek grammar correction for the editor.

In English when talking about things like proof of stake, we don't say It's a security," we say "it's secure." I know these suffixes are hard though, so I forgive the error, Buterin said.

While Bankless founder Ryan Sean Adams called the retort the spiciest Vitalik tweet Ive ever read, this is far from the first time Buterins gotten into arguments with anti-Ethereum Bitcoiners online.

Earlier this month Buterin responded to Bitcoin maximalist Jimmy Song, who argued that proof of stake does not provide decentralized consensus because it does not, in Songs view, solve The Byzantine Generals Problem. Song was referring to the problem of achieving consensus without dome centralization through a trusted single party. Consensus in crypto is achieved when multiple entities are all able to agree on the same data without the intervention of a central authoritythis enables blockchain transactions.

But for Vitalik, Songs argument hinges on a technicality.

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, Buterin said.

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Ethereums Vitalik Buterin Claps Back at Bitcoin Maxis Who Mock Proof of Stake - Decrypt