Blockstream CEO Adam Back — inventor of the hashcash Proof-of-Piece of work (Pw) system after used in Bitcoin's (BTC) mining algorithm — has controversially compared Ethereum (ETH) with the now-defunct biotech startup Theranos.

As part of a Twitter commutation published on Nov. 26, Back claimed that Ethereum's allegedly overweening promises could be compared to the failures of Theranos. He argued:

"Theranos had several generations of medical testing devices, and pushed their engineers extremely hard. The management just went too far into overselling what it could do and misrepresentation virtually the country of the tech. Uncannily ethereum-like."

From Stanford to Silicon Valley to the SEC

The cautionary tale of Theranos has attained near-legendary condition due to both the precocity of its founder and its dizzying trajectory of hype and plummet.

Founded by a nineteen-yr quondam Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes, the startup was hailed for its revolutionary promises to reshape the biomedical industry with a pioneering new grade of claret sample testing, using nanotechnology and robotics.

From her meridian as the earth's youngest cocky-made female billionaire, Holmes concluded her public career in disgrace when Theranos came nether investigation by the United States Securities and Substitution Commission. In charges settled in 2018, the regulator agency judged the enterprise — once valued at $9 billion — equally a secretive and "elaborate, years-long fraud."

Responding to Back'southward argument on Twitter yesterday, former Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd extended the lessons of Theranos beyond Ethereum, pointedly arguing that:

"Theranos was a successful scam considering they really were developing new engineering. The scam was in lying almost what that engineering science could actually do and roofing upwardly failures.So much of blockchain tech does this: ETH, Teechan, Tierion, Ripple, even Zcash to a degree."

Partisan divides

Both Dorsum and Todd's comments sparked fervent disagreements from community members — ane that possibly predictably split along tribalistic divide between so-dubbed Bitcoin Maximalists and Ethereum advocates.

Others voiced their discomfort at the comparing betwixt a proven fraud that courted the run a risk of endangering lives with the aspirations of the Ethereum projection.

Another bone of contention rested on the auditability of the open up-source development and testing that is prevalent in the Ethereum community, which goes against the grain of Theranos' infamous stealth tactics.

Before this month, Ethereum Foundation team atomic number 82 Péter Szilágyi confirmed the Dec. 4 date for the network'due south upcoming upgrade, Istanbul, development of which has been channeled via a series of Ethereum Comeback Proposals published every bit a GitHub repository.