Jack Dorsey and Vitalik Buterin have been squabbling for months over whether bitcoin or ethereum is better. Here's how their head-butting began.

Buterin may have launched a news site called Bitcoin Magazine in 2012, but he's cautioned against the coin recently.

The Ethereum co-founder told CNN in May 2021 that "if Bitcoin sticks with its technology exactly as it is today, there's a big risk it will get left behind."

Both bitcoin and ethereum have gotten flack over the amount of energy it takes for miners to mine the coins, which entails using high-powered computers to solve complex computational puzzles.

However, ethereum is inching toward what everyone is calling The Merge. It's when the cryptocurrency will transition to a so-called proof-of-stake mechanism that eats up less energy.

In June 2021, Dorsey told Miami's bitcoin-loving conference crowd that he's all in on the coin and dismissed the likes of ethereum and dogecoin, the latter being an Elon Musk favorite.

"All of the other coins, for me, don't factor in at all," Dorsey said, later adding that bitcoin will be the most important work that he does during his lifetime and that he will never buy ethereum.

He has called bitcoin's 2008 white paper "poetry."

Simply put, he thinks bitcoin will be the future native currency of the online world, even tweeting "Yes, Bitcoin will" in response to rapper Cardi B's tweet asking if crypto is going to replace the dollar.

Dorsey did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment ahead of publication.

It's worth noting he did tweet in 2021 in response to a user asking about his ethereum "hate" that "focus on one thing isn't hate of the others. I've made my concerns known about others in comparison to Bitcoin. Key ones are founding principles, security, and centralization."

However, he would still later make public remarks against the Ethereum technology.

Dorsey declared the month prior that his then-Square, now-Block company was standing up a bitcoin-oriented crypto exchange called TBD built on the Bitcoin blockchain.

But Buterin cast doubt on the project, describing bitcoin's blockchain technology as lacking the proper feats for serving as the backbone of an entire DeFi ecosystem.

"I am skeptical about Decentralized Finance on top of Bitcoin as Ethereum has native functionalities such as smart contracts that support different anomalies of Defi," Buterin told Bloomberg. "Bitcoin doesn't have those native functionalities and thus Dorsey would have to build a new system to incorporate those … and even if he is able to do that the trust level would be very weak."

Buterin did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment ahead of publication.

Buterin's Ethereum blockchain has been praised as an easy-to-use network on which to build decentralized apps and create new crypto tokens. It can power things like NFTs, for example.

Bitcoin, though the largest cryptocurrency in the world by market cap, doesn't have that kind of designation for its own blockchain, which is a first-generation version that only allows the sending and receiving of tokens.

A noted Ethereum developer posted a tweet expressing their desire for Dorsey to come on board with accepting other blockchains, like Ethereum.

Dorsey responded, "I believe in you and your ability to understand systems. It's critical we focus our energy on truly secure and resilient technologies owned by the mass of people, not individuals or institutions. Only that foundation will provide for the applications you allude to."

Buterin tweeted his stance on Musk taking over Twitter, saying he's more opposed to high-dollar hostile takeovers of social media firms than he is of the Tesla CEO running the platform.

Dorsey commented simply, "same."

But after a blockchain company slid into the thread to promote its business to the Twitter founder, he took the opportunity to make another jab at Buterin's technology.

"if [sic] you're building on ETH you have at least one, if not many, single points of failure and therefore not interesting to me," Dorsey tweeted.