Top Social Gainers for Friday, May 31st, 2019

Here are Friday's biggest developing stories in crypto based on Santiment's data:

• WTC/Walton/Waltonchain (160+ new mentions in last 24 hours)

Allegations of plagiarism and non-attribution flood the crypto subreddits after Waltochain released the open source code of its recently-launched Waltonchain mainnet.

The drama started shortly after a community member shared a message from the WTC team announcing the code’s release, complete with a link to Waltonchain’s github repo and information about the PoW Reward Program:

It didn’t take long before someone mentioned that the released code is pretty much just a copy of Go-Ethereum, with all references to Go-Eth code’s original authors removed:

Go Ethereum is one of the three original implementations (along with C++ and Python) of the Ethereum protocol written in Go, which is fully open source. A few reddit users claimed they’ve compared the two documents in full, with a 92% match between Waltonchain’s and Go-Ethereum’s code:

And while the stark similarities led to quick accusations of plagiarism, malintent and uncreativity, some were quick to point out that Waltonchain’s mainnet was in fact meant to be a Go-Ethereum fork, repurposed for the project’s own needs:

From there, two separate yet stubbornly interwoven debates emerged. On the one hand, some conceded there’s nothing inherently wrong with massive chunks of WTC’s code essentially being CTRL-V’d from Go-Eth, but took offense to the obfuscation of the code’s original creators and the general GNU General Public License details from the end document.

Soon after the uproar, the WTC team rectified the code and added proper attribution:

The other part of the debate, then, focused on whether there were actually any significant, qualitative additions to WTC’s code other than the copy-pasted lines, that would in fact warrant another Go-Eth fork. As part of the announcement about proper licenses being added to the code, there was a list of supposed improvements achieved via the new Waltonchain mainnet:

This translated into a more material discussion on the viability, legitimacy and general effectiveness of the above list of improvements, which you can read about in the original thread.

Safe to say that not everyone was convinced though, with some in the WTC community wondering if much of the original code was still being kept private, with varying degrees of confidence to that claim:

• NKN (25+ new mentions in last 24 hours):

Did IOTA plagiarize its proposed solution to a ‘blockchain trilemma’ from a little-known project’s 2018 whitepaper?

This is the claim made by ‘Lucian’ in his latest medium post, in which he alleges striking similarities in the two concepts and suggests a conscious effort from IOTA to avoid giving credit where credit’s due.

In short, a blockchain trilemma posits that no current project’s been able to achieve the coveted trichotomy of scalability, security, and decentralization at the same time. All existing blockchains are forced to skimp on at least one of the sides of the triangle for the sake of optimizing the other two.

Up until now, IOTA claimed to have achieved both  scalability and security but has remained decidedly centralized, as evident by its so-called Coordinator which is currently responsible for controlling transactions and security on the IOTA blockchain.

However, the project has recently announced an attempt to solve the blockchain trilemma by killing off its Coordinator (they dubbed this effort ‘Coordicide’), which they hope to do by implementing a mathematical concept dubbed ‘Cellular Automata’.

I’m not going to even try to explain the theory behind Cellular Automata (more details on it can be found in Lucian’s post), nor is the concept close to being implemented in IOTA’s blockchain at this point. The drama, however, stems from the fact that this same premise was introduced in a 2018 whitepaper by a small crypto project known as ‘NKN’ (New Kind of Network).

Lucian goes on to make the claim that NKN’s work on Cellular Automata should be impossible to miss for anyone doing serious research on the topic, leading him to conclude that IOTA intentionally omitted any reference to the project in their recent documentation on the topic.

And while IOTA’s Hans Moog denied any such efforts, the allegation made waves across several crypto subreddits, splitting the community on the claim’s legitimacy. While some believe IOTA must have been aware of NKN’s work on Cellular Automata:

Others dismissed malintent by pointing to the fact that CA is not exactly a new concept, first being introduced back in the 1970’s:

Finally, some took a wholly pragmatic view of the situation in saying that the best would be for IOTA to retroactively acknowledge NKN in its documentation, which should lay the entire issue to rest:

For his part, Moog did say IOTA will add the necessary NKN citations, and proposed that the two projects jump on a conference call to discuss their respective CA implementations:

• Vegeta/Bounce/Dip (420+ new mentions in last 24 hours):

Bitcoin surged past $9000 for a fleeting moment today, hitting a 12-month high $9,096 on Bitstamp before plunging south less than half an hour later. Though short-lived, the rally was particularly welcomed by the meme-loving section of the cryptoverse, which waited a full year to be able to bust out the ‘it’s over 9000’ Vegeta memes:

The initial excitement quickly gave way to melancholy, as the Big Kahuna dropped to as low as $8,589 shortly after the fact:

Some in the community even blamed the immediate dip on the Super Saiyan sightings (with varying degrees of seriousness), and pleaded with the community to hold off on their spiciest Dragon Ball memes until BTC is squarely over the $9000 mark:

And so, premature Vegeta memes join the ranks of CNBC’s pro-Bitcoin editorials in the upper echelon of bearish meme indicators. Truly a momentous day for crypto enthusiasts everywhere.

As always, head over to our Social Trends page for the latest updates.