Justin Sun, Vitalik Buterin trade barbs and strained avocado metaphors

By Ben Munster

First Justin Sun tweaked Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin by claiming he was obsessed by Tron—then Buterin laid him low with a rejoinder about avocados.

Welcome to crypto twitter, the modern world’s answer to High School for Ethernity.

The recent smart-food fight began a few days ago, after Tron’s Justin Sun began taunting Buterin over flattering comments he had made about BitTorrent. In the clip, the Ethereum inventor cites BitTorrent as an early, commendable piece of decentralized software.

Sun, of course, purchased the file-sharing service last year, and in January raised $7 million in a fundraiser of Tron-powered “BitTorrent tokens.” Twitter user “@CryptoBeats” had posted the supposedly incriminating footage with the caption, “@VitalikButerin praises the decentralized file-sharing network BitTorrent. #BitTorrent is the perfect vehicle for TRON to increase mass adoption & scalability for dApps.”

“TRON is e v e r y w h e r e,” he added.

Egged on CryptoBeats’s apparently Buterin-stinging words, Sun retweeted the post, writing “hahahaha why he is [sic] so obsessed with #BitTorrent? I don't understand,” appending his tweet with a grim stream of hashtags. (“$TRON,” $TRX,” etc.)

That caused a thing named TRON DApps to squeal with excitement, recapping the story so far to his 1,003 followers, as if standing in a circle with 1,003 gawkers, while two bloodied and filthy school boys were brawling in the school yard. 

Beset on all sides by weird, faintly libelous tweets, Buterin was spurred to action. The young polymath has frequently criticized Tron for, among other things, plagiarizing its own white paper. He now had no choice but to set things straight himself, using the devastating power of logic:

“That interview was from Aug 2017,” he astutely pointed out. “Tron acquired bittorrent in July 2018. My praise for bittorrent had nothing to do with Tron. This is like implying that because I like avocados, I approve of everyone who has ever bought an avocado.”

Boom.

Sun swiftly countered that a competitive market of avocados didn’t quite serve the metaphor.

“We all love avocados,” he wrote. “I acquired all avocado farms and reached to [sic] monopoly. Now if you still love avocados you have to listen to me. However, I am happy to give you free avocados for sure!”

Youch!

(For those un-versed in Sun-speak, he was pointing out that Buterin’s avocado metaphor was flawed—there is only one BitTorrent! And Sun purchased it! That made him the point at which the avocado-opinion buck stops! Full stop.)

We will provide updates to this extraordinary scoop as it unfolds.

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