Bloomberg’s senior exchange-traded fund (ETF) analyst Eric Balchunas riled up the online Ethereum community, many of whom claimed he posted “misinformation” in a now-deleted X post.
On Oct. 7, Balchunas shared an excerpt from Benjamin Hart’s book, Bitcoin: Beginner’s Guide, and added that Ether (ETH) “just isn’t the same or as secure” as Bitcoin (BTC) in response to a request for a crypto book recommendation from ETF Store president Nate Geraci.
The book excerpt claimed that the United States government could “shut down Ethereum” by telling Amazon Web Services (AWS) to turn off its cloud services.
According to Ethernodes, 28.4% of Ethereum nodes use AWS as a hosting provider, but this is not enough to totally knock the network offline.
Ethereum node hosting share. Source: Ethernodes
The book’s other claim was that a rogue state or terrorist organization could kidnap Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and force him to hand over “all the Ether they want.”
Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano said in response to Balchunas’ deleted post that it was “absolute blatant misinformation and pretty much complete propaganda.”
Sassano added: “You should be utterly ashamed of yourself for even sharing this (and you only deleted it because you didn’t want to deal with people calling you out).”
Source: Anthony Sassano
Consensys product manager Jimmy Ragosa said the shared excerpt was “the most propaganda-ridden paragraph ever.”
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Balchunas’ fellow Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart replied to the now-deleted post, saying, “These replies are about to be amazing hahaha.”
Balchunas replied, “Lol I don’t have time today, will just leave up Bitcoin sections.”
Ethereum developers have recently emphasized solo staking and low hardware requirements to further decentralize the blockchain.
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