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We should remember the most often centralized aspect of blockchain projects promising a fully-decentralized future: the developer teams. They are typically very

by wyc 9y ago

We should remember the most often centralized aspect of blockchain projects promising a fully-decentralized future: the developer teams. They are typically very centralized with disproportionate power over the network. See the graphs in the second half of this article: https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c... This isn't necessarily damning, as "everything has to start somewhere," but it definitely doesn't warrant self-congratulatory pats on the back exclaiming a decentralized utopia. There's still a lot of work to do, but these projects might be the furthest along we've seen after open-source software.

cjslep 9y ago
It was certainly damning to Ethereum when they forked the currency to rescue the DAO.
- imustbeevil 9y ago
  Maybe not to the price, but certainly to the movement. A majority of users don't care about decentralization. Ethereum proved that. The only thing most people want from cryptocurrencies is more USD than they put in. Editted to better represent reality.
  - cantrip 9y ago
    I think there is certainly a massive amount of uneducated speculation going on in the crypto currency world, but saying things like "no one cares about decentralization" shows a foolish lack of knowledge about the whole space. A lot of very smart people care passionately about decentralization and the technology is going to change a lot of things. It seems like from your post history you're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
    - 549362-30499 9y ago
      I think there's certainly some interesting ideas happening, but the jury is still very much out on whether cryptocurrencies even have a future. It's been several years now and we have... what? Thousands of memes about never spending your currency because it's going to be worth x1,000,000 in the future?
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        Oh boy, you could say that about any tech that hasn't quite hit mainstream couldn't you? Including VR/AR and self driving cars, except these technologies have been around much, much longer (decades) and have yet to go fully mainstream. Bitcoin itself is 9 years old. Ethereum is barely 3 years old. Meanwhile, people are building decentralized trading platforms, prediction markets, provably fair online casinos, an entirely new venture funding model has been created, crypto collateralized loans, virtual assets trading, IOT-based supply chain management, and so much more. You'd realize that if you looked past the memes, there's something there, it's still very early, but it's growing rapidly.
    - mrisoli 9y ago
      While there are a lot of people who care about technology it pales in comparison to those who just want a quick buck from a manic bubble, using the term "no one" is extreme but it's not completely unfitting.
  - baby 9y ago
    Or some people like me believed in the technology and decided that an early fix was a good thing. Most people who were against the fix did not care much about ethereum, if they did they are on ethereum classic now.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  I mean, Ethereum classic is still out there, still going fairly strong if you like.
- baby 9y ago
  Actually, decentralization has hurt Ethereum quite a lot since Ethereum Classic was created because of the DAO.
xiphias 9y ago
With Bitcoin what's great is that there were no hard forks for a long time (and not planned), so I can still use and old software if I want to send transactions. With Ethereum whenever there's a hard fork I have to upgrade and trust the dev. team even for spending my own money. Also as I'm using multi-sig, the parity bug and the complexity of multi-sig code makes me unable to use it. For Bitcoin I read the multi-sig code myself, as it's just a simple stack machine code that anybody could read (and the transaction format is simple enough to understand).
SkyMarshal 9y ago
There will inevitably be some centralization of development, as moving forward on a roadmap requires developer consensus. The only way to deal with that is to shift that centralization to a detailed protocol spec instead of to a specific implementation, so that multiple developer teams can build different implementations that remain inter-operable. That's attractive in theory but very difficult to achieve in practice, even with a spec. That said, it looks like at least one initiative to do this in the industry is succeeding - Lightning Network. The protocol was agreed on last fall and now all three main implementations are inter-operating on mainnet.

by wyc 9y ago

cjslep 9y ago

It was certainly damning to Ethereum when they forked the currency to rescue the DAO.

imustbeevil 9y ago
Maybe not to the price, but certainly to the movement. A majority of users don't care about decentralization. Ethereum proved that. The only thing most people want from cryptocurrencies is more USD than they put in. Editted to better represent reality.
- cantrip 9y ago
  I think there is certainly a massive amount of uneducated speculation going on in the crypto currency world, but saying things like "no one cares about decentralization" shows a foolish lack of knowledge about the whole space. A lot of very smart people care passionately about decentralization and the technology is going to change a lot of things. It seems like from your post history you're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
  - 549362-30499 9y ago
    I think there's certainly some interesting ideas happening, but the jury is still very much out on whether cryptocurrencies even have a future. It's been several years now and we have... what? Thousands of memes about never spending your currency because it's going to be worth x1,000,000 in the future?
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      Oh boy, you could say that about any tech that hasn't quite hit mainstream couldn't you? Including VR/AR and self driving cars, except these technologies have been around much, much longer (decades) and have yet to go fully mainstream. Bitcoin itself is 9 years old. Ethereum is barely 3 years old. Meanwhile, people are building decentralized trading platforms, prediction markets, provably fair online casinos, an entirely new venture funding model has been created, crypto collateralized loans, virtual assets trading, IOT-based supply chain management, and so much more. You'd realize that if you looked past the memes, there's something there, it's still very early, but it's growing rapidly.
  - mrisoli 9y ago
    While there are a lot of people who care about technology it pales in comparison to those who just want a quick buck from a manic bubble, using the term "no one" is extreme but it's not completely unfitting.
- baby 9y ago
  Or some people like me believed in the technology and decided that an early fix was a good thing. Most people who were against the fix did not care much about ethereum, if they did they are on ethereum classic now.
chrisco255 9y ago
I mean, Ethereum classic is still out there, still going fairly strong if you like.
baby 9y ago
Actually, decentralization has hurt Ethereum quite a lot since Ethereum Classic was created because of the DAO.

xiphias 9y ago

With Bitcoin what's great is that there were no hard forks for a long time (and not planned), so I can still use and old software if I want to send transactions. With Ethereum whenever there's a hard fork I have to upgrade and trust the dev. team even for spending my own money. Also as I'm using multi-sig, the parity bug and the complexity of multi-sig code makes me unable to use it. For Bitcoin I read the multi-sig code myself, as it's just a simple stack machine code that anybody could read (and the transaction format is simple enough to understand).

SkyMarshal 9y ago

There will inevitably be some centralization of development, as moving forward on a roadmap requires developer consensus. The only way to deal with that is to shift that centralization to a detailed protocol spec instead of to a specific implementation, so that multiple developer teams can build different implementations that remain inter-operable. That's attractive in theory but very difficult to achieve in practice, even with a spec. That said, it looks like at least one initiative to do this in the industry is succeeding - Lightning Network. The protocol was agreed on last fall and now all three main implementations are inter-operating on mainnet.