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> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Diffi

by amasad 8y ago

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? > In June, they decided to make a clean break and to build an entirely new blockchain—one that operates solely via PoS. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? I'm a total dilettante in crypto but if something is decentralized you can't make large-scale changes to it at the drop of a hat. Imagine how much coordination effort it takes to change TCP/IP or HTTP.

hanniabu 8y ago
The miners can choose to fork fork away from those changes. The core team is merely starting the change and the miners are supporting and carrying out those changes by continuing to mine the chain with those updates.
- amasad 8y ago
  Why would the miners agree to adding the "difficulty bomb" which is against their incentives? It's more likely they didn't have a say in it.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Because otherwise they end up mining the chain that nobody's using. You can own a lot of ETC and it doesn't do you much good if you can't sell them because nobody's interested in using or trading them.
    - amasad 8y ago
      However in Bitcoin the opposite happened -- the classic chain is the most valuable one despite being the least "scalable" or whatever pet feature the forks has. Also despite all the bitcoin celebrities being for the fork. That's behaving more like a decentralized technology that no single entity controls.
      - darawk 8y ago
        What's happening is people are voting with their feet. Anyone can make any fork they like, and then everyone on the network can choose which one they prefer to use. That is what decentralization means. And both Ethereum and Bitcoin have that property.
      - iSnow 8y ago
        A lot of BTC celebs didn't follow BCH at all. And essentially, L2 scaling as well as SegWit was shoved down our throats by the BTC Core devs. I don't see how that was very decentralized. OTOH, I am not strongly against it, as decentralization doesn't mean every single aspect has to be free of centralized decision making (starting with the name, logo or the code). In the end, users decide if they want to use it or not.
  - chowells 8y ago
    If the miners ever have a serious disagreement with the core developers, they can always remove the difficulty bomb in a fork. The purpose of the difficulty bomb is to force some update, not to force the core developers' preferred update.
    - make3 8y ago
      the idea that forks are easy enough for the power to be distributed seems ludacris. you need to fork a large ratio of the users in order for a fork to do anything at all, otherwise the new coin has no value. This a gives massive inertia advantage to the original project
      - ascendantlogic 8y ago
        Yes because humans are still the end users here and humans congregate into groups. Network effect is a human trait. In order for any network to be useful it needs a majority of people agreeing to use it, and to that end it ends up with inertia. There is no utopia, there's just "more decentralized" or "less decentralized"
      - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
        Thanks, I feel like I’m the crazy one when people talk about “just fork it” in response to the fact that developers of any specific coin could crash it at any point. That’s not how it works in reality. Bitcoin could be entirely ruined by a couple dozen people around the world in different ways at any time. Eth and other coins even more so. The idea of who “gets trusted” in these coins is just nuts. I’m not anti-coin... but man, I’m feel like I’m far enough from it to see a reality that many want to ignore.
        iSnow 8y ago
        I think your misunderstanding is believing users are locked into a crypto system if its implementation is controlled by a small group. They are not - if the developers abuse their power, users are free to migrate elsewhere and take their funds with them (in fiat value or as a different coin). That's different to e.g. PayPal where your funds can be locked and there's nothing you can do. Decentralized control over name, logo, features or code of a crypto coin is extremely hard to impossible, if only because there aren't too many people alive that can discuss core crypto features with any meaningful knowledge (I know I can't). Some coins do have governance features, but none of those have profited very much from that.
  - dahdum 8y ago
    The miners aren’t looked at the same way in Ethereum because you don’t have the large concentration of mining to a handful of companies like Bitcoin. Also because from the very first whitepaper it’s been known Ethereum would move to PoS.
- deleted 8y ago
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- exo762 8y ago
  Wrong. Economic majority decides which fork will live and which fork will die. Miners have no say. If they are unhappy, they may attempt to attack fork abiding to new rules. Whey have three venues of attack. 1. Producing blocks that abide to old rules will do nothing - client software will just reject them as incorrect. Fork choice rule (e.g. longest chain or most work done) applies when choosing between two valid blocks, not between valid block and invalid block. 2. Attempts to do a famous 51% attack is crazy expensive and have low impact. Why low impact? Because small events that are similar to rewriting history 51% attack does happen all the time. They are called block reorgs and all the software which uses blockchain as a data store have to handle it properly. Also, such attack will be perceived by users as attack on them, solidifying community around opposition to miners. 3. Targeting difficulty adjustment algorithm by mining on a fork and leaving it at the beginning of adjustment period. Lets imagine 80% of miners leaving. For Bitcoin it would create a situation when adjustment period would last 8 weeks instead of 2. Blocks would be produced every 40 minutes at average instead of 10. Ethereum is immune to this type of attack since difficulty adjustment is done every block, not every 2016 blocks.
  - iSnow 8y ago
    There's additionally 4. Targeting transaction throughput via spam/dust attacks where malicious miners introduce empty blocks or transactions with very small sums to clog up the network/drive up tx fees. To my knowledge, this has been tried against BTC, ETH, NEO, and BCH, where at least the dust attacks against BTC were done to try to force a big-block agenda.
  - hanniabu 8y ago
    All of the things you listed are in the miners control. Of course this requires economic means, but just having economic right is not enough, you still need to contribute to mining.
    - exo762 8y ago
      > All of the things you listed are in the miners control. May I ask you to elaborate? My point is - miners' power over the network is extremely limited. They are just a paid work force, working on a very small margin. They have almost no say where network will go in terms of evolution.
sincerely 8y ago
Enough people think the changes are a good idea that they switch versions.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Can you show when this has successfully happened? Can you show a popular coin that the devs went one direction with, a different group didn’t like, forked, and became more used than the original?
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    More used? No, but why is that necessary? Wide use is all that's necessary. Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic are traded on all crypto exchanges that matter.
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Both of those have suffer major losses to low or near record lows. Is that really a good pitch for ”just fork it if you don’t like it!” I just want people to admit and understand their “decentralized” commodities are anything but. Yea, the mathy database is, but you still need to put all your trust in a handful of developers with mostly no economics experience, no oversight, and no track record.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    CryptoNote It is the predecessor to Monero, development there stalled in politics, and some people forked Monero. Admittedly, it wasn't very big when the split happened. I'm not sure of the capitalization.
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Hmm, CryptoNote doesn't seem to be a currency at all. It seems to be a code base behind other currencies as much as I can tell. CryptoNoteCoin seems to be a reference implementation that isn't "real". The discussion is when did a coin - fork into a different coin and become more successful than it's predecessor? Because if it's "well, never... yet!", then the argument that "development is centralized but that's ok because you can just fork it if you don't like the developer's plans" - is effectively a lie. Also, while I probably know way less than you on this overall, I do know Monero has seen successful because it's effective to be run as a scam on victim computers (mining malware) and on websites that use JS on your computer to mine coin. Almost all the web and malware mines Monero. It gives me the impression as the least legitimate coin I can think of because of the number of times I've seen this.
SquishyPanda23 8y ago
I'm sure mine is a minority opinion, but I don't think Ethereum has any credibility as something that I'd call decentralized in the sense crypto enthusiasts often mean. I think this is true of a lot of cryptocurrency tools as well. Centralization is okay. There is a lot of power that comes with it. In my view Ethereum has chosen to wield that power while wearing the backwards hat and skateboard of decentralization and claiming to be one of the cool kids.
- leppr 8y ago
  It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists. An important ability required to understand Ethereum is to be able to separate the raw technology's properties with the development governance story. The Ethereum network derives trustlessness from PoW and its miners. The security guarantees these provide can be considered in isolation to politics. It's just numbers, and the git history of the various specs and implementations is public. Any community can start a new chain, from any version of Ethereum. And they do, many altcoins are more or less 1:1 forks of Ethereum yet reach huge valuations. The Ethereum foundation has 0 power over these networks. That's what decentralization means in this case, even if the development is as centralized as any other FOSS project.
  - xorcist 8y ago
    > It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists That's perhaps the least useful pejorative ever invented. It's been a trivial observation from the start that if your problem is adequately solved by payment service backed with a traditional database then that will always have lower operating costs. (This does not mean blockchains are useless, but that there is a natural limit to their usefulness.) Lately that's enough to get you branded as a "Bitcoin maximalist", which is more than a little bit silly.
    - leppr 8y ago
      That was a neutral remark on the parent's first sentence about his being a minority opinion, not a pejorative against doubting blockchains' intrinsic value or whatever you seem to have understood.
zanny 8y ago
> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see their clients forked. A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... trust. That magical thing crypto users keep trying to keep decentralized. But when development of the currency is centralized... and at the end of the day, someone is the owner of the git repo... you can't decentralize the implementation of the currency. So what we see instead is enthusiasts putting their faith and trust in the sense of the developers of their chosen coin pretty much to the bitter end. You can fork these currencies - like Bitcoin Cash succeeded in doing for the most part - but you won't steal their mindshare or userbase to any major degree. They will stick to the original client or see that particular chain abandoned entirely. Doge and so many other coins died to negligent or exploitative developers and whomever that someone is thats proposing to take over is an unknown, at least less trusted quantity. So most would jump ship than take the chance, so coins either stay under one development process or die completely with no real middle ground.
- opnitro 8y ago
  https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm This paper is ever important when trying to come up with technical solutions to societal organization.
  - joakimbr 8y ago
    Fascinating reading. Thank you for this article!
  - vnorilo 8y ago
    I am shocked at how true that rings even though my circumstances are so different from hers. Thank you for linking!
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Oh this is the article about feminist organizations? Yes, that was a fantastic read, and I always use it when I want to argue against flat organizations, it's very compelling.
shittyadmin 8y ago
> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mistakes, they proved how centralized Ethereum was - anyone who believed it was a truly decentralized network left at that point.
- Iv 8y ago
  And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
    - stanleydrew 8y ago
      Decentralization matters to a few enthusiasts. Those enthusiasts include the developers of the technology. So the point of these technologies is decentralization, but the "users" of the technologies don't actually care and are hoping to speculate their way to lambo riches. (I put "users" in quotes since there are actually very few true "users", and I'm really just describing people who trade cryptos on exchanges.)
      - wuliwong 8y ago
        My belief is that the recent corporate censorship by large internet companies has created a growing interest in decentralization by some non-technical people. I don't think it is a slam dunk but I do think that currently there is a much greater chance for decentralized applications to gain traction. That being said, I think this new crop of potential users could also buy into new companies that have a centralized architecture but simply market themselves as having an ethos of non-censorship.
deleted 8y ago
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skywhopper 8y ago
It's the ironic twist at the heart of crypto: a centralized system built on implicit trust and community standards is actually required to build a functioning economy. Participating in any particular blockchain is only as valuable as the community around it. So while forking is always an option, a fork will only be worth following if comes with a functional community with agreed-upon standards. So you can (try to) decentralize the process of verifying that everyone is playing fair (whatever that means in your system), but so long as you all want to trade with each other, you must have a centralized authority of some sort, to decide what "playing fair" means.
- jpadkins 8y ago
  I think this was understood even in the earliest days of bitcoin. The centralized system of "playing fair" was the protocol, which as you point out, is a centralized community standard. Blockchain is independent actors following a common protocol. If the actors don't follow the centralized, common protocol then the economy disintegrates.
nebulous1 8y ago
I think the centralisation issue with most cryptocurrencies is quite interesting. Almost all of them have a generally accepted organization that controls their development. This organization can make large-scale changes but controversial ones usually lead to breakaway forks. Theoretically these forks could be more valuable than the one controlled by the organization. In practice if a fork wants to be successful it's going to need its own organization.
zby 8y ago
This is about making credible commitments, decentralization is a mean to that. What we see here is that the commitments can never be absolutely credible - but maybe that is not too bad, maybe we can live with some relativity.
dlubarov 8y ago
Quoting Vitalik: > If someone puts a gun to my head & tells me to write a hardfork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download & install the update & switch to that chain? I see few raised hands. This is called decentralization. Sure, the Ethereum Foundation has substantial influence in the sense that their proposed changes tend to be adopted, but that's because they tend to propose good changes. If they propose a bad change, chances are the community will reject it. If they propose a questionable/controversial change, chances are the community will fork, as with the DAO fork.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  This is a joke, not decentralisation.
  - amasad 8y ago
    Is it really a joke? Because if this is seen as a valid argument in the Ethereuem community then they've really gone off the deep end.
    - wuliwong 8y ago
      Decentralization is not my area of expertise but I am growing very interested. I've recently been learning a lot more about building decentralized apps using blockchains and distributed file storage. Could you expand a little upon why this is a joke? I understand that it is not describing a good situation but my understanding was that the miners are a part of the decentralizing infrastructure in the way that was described in the quote. Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you suggest some other reading for me on creating decentralized applications not using blockchain. I've wondered myself if it makes much sense that everything would be built on blockchains in the future.
      - StreamBright 8y ago
        Everything is centralized on the internet. People quite often forget that most of the internet backbone is vulnerable to all sort of attacks (BGP hijacking) or even just mass surveillance because most of the traffic is going through few devices. Unless I can directly reach your computer on the network without a 3rd party provider which can deny me that access you can't be seriously thinking about decentralization. Another issue that I see with these projects that claim to be decentralized, for example ipfs.io is that they do not consider worst case scenarios so they cannot have a service level agreements on their service. Most of the customer networks are asymmetric, you have much more bandwidth to download content than to upload so if you are providing services than you are going to saturate your uplink. Nodes can also be turned off, worst case scenario is that all of the nodes are off that has a piece of data that you can't recover from anywhere else. As of everything going to be built on the blockchain in the future, most definitely not. I think 2019 going to wipe out most of the cryptocurrencies and we are going to see very few successful blockchain (or more like distributed ledger) projects succeeding in the corporate space. Maybe there will be some use cases for blockchain/DLT like food traceability (one project i have contributed to) and customer warranty for example but all this hype that everything will be running on blockchain will just fade.
iSnow 8y ago
Fair point, but ETH is not just Mr. Buterin and some close friends deciding to postpone mining winter at will. There are currently 8 groups building ETH implementations (https://www.coindesk.com/next-gen-buidlers-the-8-teams-working-on-ethereum-2-0 https://www.coindesk.com/next-gen-buidlers-the-8-teams-worki...), so you have /some/ level of decentralization since they all have some weight in decisions. Ultimately, the consensus in any classical blockchain HAS to be uniform, and that introduces an element of centralization (via the consensus algorithm used). That has always been true, and the contentious forks of BTC (and lately BCH) with their fights about the ticker symbol, name, and who has the "true vision" have made this pretty clear. Differing minority opinions have to go the hard fork way and hope to build something better.
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decentralised 8y ago
There's a misunderstanding of what decentralisation means. The difficulty bomb is in the code but the node operators (miners, etc) have to chose to upgrade their clients to work with the new fork rules. The decision of which code to run and which chain becomes canonical is in the hands of the community of users and not the developers, despite the Ethereum Foundation having full ownership of the protocol development process.
celticninja 8y ago
Ethereum is not decentralised. The hard fork after the DAO hack proved that. Combined with its limitless supply it's pretty much pointless in its current incarnation.
rsynnott 8y ago
As you'd probably expect, the answer is that it isn't meaningfully decentralised. Nor is bitcoin, by the way.
menzoic 8y ago
> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable. It just means that power and responsibility is distriubted to many. > I'm a total dilettante in crypto but if something is decentralized you can't make large-scale changes to it at the drop of a hat. Exactly, you're correct. It's not easy for these changes to actually take effect. It takes a majority of miners to vote for and adopt any change/fork. The miners are the ones who are running the decentralized network. Even miners who vote for the change can choose to not upgrade their software to the new version. > Imagine how much coordination effort it takes to change TCP/IP or HTTP This is why I'm amazed at the skill of the Bitcoin & Ethereum team's ability to continue upgrading a platform that has no central control.
- jki275 8y ago
  The miners have zero incentive to ever let it go to proof of stake, as the instant they do they lose their income stream. So the "snooze button" as they call it, is pretty much guaranteed to keep getting pushed.
- rcxdude 8y ago
  The power of the miners is overblown: the mining power follows the price/value of the coin, not the other way around, and the price is determined by the users transacting on it, not the miners (though the miners can of course try to interfere with the users ability to transact, but this generally pushes the price down).
- splintercell 8y ago
  > Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable. It is also impossible to create immutable software.
arisAlexis 8y ago
One word. Consensus. Ethereum is not ready yet. When it is ready it will be decentralised. Still, miners need to agree for the hard fork and if they don't just like Ethereum Classic they can split. Protocol changes in blockchain projects are about consensus.
vinniejames 8y ago
Like TCP/IP or HTTP, Blockchains are a specification. You can easily change How HTTP works on your own server, as can the core devs on a blockchain project. None of that actually matters until clients begin using the new features/blockchain software en masse, that's where the decentralized piece fits in
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
BTC should have done this as well.
anonu 8y ago
Ethereum is - as the founders have repeated - very much an experiment and still in "beta". The currency aspect of Ethereum is even more of an experiment. So invest/trade/speculate at your own risk.

by amasad 8y ago

hanniabu 8y ago

The miners can choose to fork fork away from those changes. The core team is merely starting the change and the miners are supporting and carrying out those changes by continuing to mine the chain with those updates.

amasad 8y ago
Why would the miners agree to adding the "difficulty bomb" which is against their incentives? It's more likely they didn't have a say in it.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Because otherwise they end up mining the chain that nobody's using. You can own a lot of ETC and it doesn't do you much good if you can't sell them because nobody's interested in using or trading them.
  - amasad 8y ago
    However in Bitcoin the opposite happened -- the classic chain is the most valuable one despite being the least "scalable" or whatever pet feature the forks has. Also despite all the bitcoin celebrities being for the fork. That's behaving more like a decentralized technology that no single entity controls.
    - darawk 8y ago
      What's happening is people are voting with their feet. Anyone can make any fork they like, and then everyone on the network can choose which one they prefer to use. That is what decentralization means. And both Ethereum and Bitcoin have that property.
    - iSnow 8y ago
      A lot of BTC celebs didn't follow BCH at all. And essentially, L2 scaling as well as SegWit was shoved down our throats by the BTC Core devs. I don't see how that was very decentralized. OTOH, I am not strongly against it, as decentralization doesn't mean every single aspect has to be free of centralized decision making (starting with the name, logo or the code). In the end, users decide if they want to use it or not.
- chowells 8y ago
  If the miners ever have a serious disagreement with the core developers, they can always remove the difficulty bomb in a fork. The purpose of the difficulty bomb is to force some update, not to force the core developers' preferred update.
  - make3 8y ago
    the idea that forks are easy enough for the power to be distributed seems ludacris. you need to fork a large ratio of the users in order for a fork to do anything at all, otherwise the new coin has no value. This a gives massive inertia advantage to the original project
    - ascendantlogic 8y ago
      Yes because humans are still the end users here and humans congregate into groups. Network effect is a human trait. In order for any network to be useful it needs a majority of people agreeing to use it, and to that end it ends up with inertia. There is no utopia, there's just "more decentralized" or "less decentralized"
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Thanks, I feel like I’m the crazy one when people talk about “just fork it” in response to the fact that developers of any specific coin could crash it at any point. That’s not how it works in reality. Bitcoin could be entirely ruined by a couple dozen people around the world in different ways at any time. Eth and other coins even more so. The idea of who “gets trusted” in these coins is just nuts. I’m not anti-coin... but man, I’m feel like I’m far enough from it to see a reality that many want to ignore.
      - iSnow 8y ago
        I think your misunderstanding is believing users are locked into a crypto system if its implementation is controlled by a small group. They are not - if the developers abuse their power, users are free to migrate elsewhere and take their funds with them (in fiat value or as a different coin). That's different to e.g. PayPal where your funds can be locked and there's nothing you can do. Decentralized control over name, logo, features or code of a crypto coin is extremely hard to impossible, if only because there aren't too many people alive that can discuss core crypto features with any meaningful knowledge (I know I can't). Some coins do have governance features, but none of those have profited very much from that.
- dahdum 8y ago
  The miners aren’t looked at the same way in Ethereum because you don’t have the large concentration of mining to a handful of companies like Bitcoin. Also because from the very first whitepaper it’s been known Ethereum would move to PoS.
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exo762 8y ago
Wrong. Economic majority decides which fork will live and which fork will die. Miners have no say. If they are unhappy, they may attempt to attack fork abiding to new rules. Whey have three venues of attack. 1. Producing blocks that abide to old rules will do nothing - client software will just reject them as incorrect. Fork choice rule (e.g. longest chain or most work done) applies when choosing between two valid blocks, not between valid block and invalid block. 2. Attempts to do a famous 51% attack is crazy expensive and have low impact. Why low impact? Because small events that are similar to rewriting history 51% attack does happen all the time. They are called block reorgs and all the software which uses blockchain as a data store have to handle it properly. Also, such attack will be perceived by users as attack on them, solidifying community around opposition to miners. 3. Targeting difficulty adjustment algorithm by mining on a fork and leaving it at the beginning of adjustment period. Lets imagine 80% of miners leaving. For Bitcoin it would create a situation when adjustment period would last 8 weeks instead of 2. Blocks would be produced every 40 minutes at average instead of 10. Ethereum is immune to this type of attack since difficulty adjustment is done every block, not every 2016 blocks.
- iSnow 8y ago
  There's additionally 4. Targeting transaction throughput via spam/dust attacks where malicious miners introduce empty blocks or transactions with very small sums to clog up the network/drive up tx fees. To my knowledge, this has been tried against BTC, ETH, NEO, and BCH, where at least the dust attacks against BTC were done to try to force a big-block agenda.
- hanniabu 8y ago
  All of the things you listed are in the miners control. Of course this requires economic means, but just having economic right is not enough, you still need to contribute to mining.
  - exo762 8y ago
    > All of the things you listed are in the miners control. May I ask you to elaborate? My point is - miners' power over the network is extremely limited. They are just a paid work force, working on a very small margin. They have almost no say where network will go in terms of evolution.

sincerely 8y ago

Enough people think the changes are a good idea that they switch versions.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Can you show when this has successfully happened? Can you show a popular coin that the devs went one direction with, a different group didn’t like, forked, and became more used than the original?
- Karunamon 8y ago
  More used? No, but why is that necessary? Wide use is all that's necessary. Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic are traded on all crypto exchanges that matter.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Both of those have suffer major losses to low or near record lows. Is that really a good pitch for ”just fork it if you don’t like it!” I just want people to admit and understand their “decentralized” commodities are anything but. Yea, the mathy database is, but you still need to put all your trust in a handful of developers with mostly no economics experience, no oversight, and no track record.
- rocqua 8y ago
  CryptoNote It is the predecessor to Monero, development there stalled in politics, and some people forked Monero. Admittedly, it wasn't very big when the split happened. I'm not sure of the capitalization.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Hmm, CryptoNote doesn't seem to be a currency at all. It seems to be a code base behind other currencies as much as I can tell. CryptoNoteCoin seems to be a reference implementation that isn't "real". The discussion is when did a coin - fork into a different coin and become more successful than it's predecessor? Because if it's "well, never... yet!", then the argument that "development is centralized but that's ok because you can just fork it if you don't like the developer's plans" - is effectively a lie. Also, while I probably know way less than you on this overall, I do know Monero has seen successful because it's effective to be run as a scam on victim computers (mining malware) and on websites that use JS on your computer to mine coin. Almost all the web and malware mines Monero. It gives me the impression as the least legitimate coin I can think of because of the number of times I've seen this.

SquishyPanda23 8y ago

I'm sure mine is a minority opinion, but I don't think Ethereum has any credibility as something that I'd call decentralized in the sense crypto enthusiasts often mean. I think this is true of a lot of cryptocurrency tools as well. Centralization is okay. There is a lot of power that comes with it. In my view Ethereum has chosen to wield that power while wearing the backwards hat and skateboard of decentralization and claiming to be one of the cool kids.

leppr 8y ago
It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists. An important ability required to understand Ethereum is to be able to separate the raw technology's properties with the development governance story. The Ethereum network derives trustlessness from PoW and its miners. The security guarantees these provide can be considered in isolation to politics. It's just numbers, and the git history of the various specs and implementations is public. Any community can start a new chain, from any version of Ethereum. And they do, many altcoins are more or less 1:1 forks of Ethereum yet reach huge valuations. The Ethereum foundation has 0 power over these networks. That's what decentralization means in this case, even if the development is as centralized as any other FOSS project.
- xorcist 8y ago
  > It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists That's perhaps the least useful pejorative ever invented. It's been a trivial observation from the start that if your problem is adequately solved by payment service backed with a traditional database then that will always have lower operating costs. (This does not mean blockchains are useless, but that there is a natural limit to their usefulness.) Lately that's enough to get you branded as a "Bitcoin maximalist", which is more than a little bit silly.
  - leppr 8y ago
    That was a neutral remark on the parent's first sentence about his being a minority opinion, not a pejorative against doubting blockchains' intrinsic value or whatever you seem to have understood.

zanny 8y ago

> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see their clients forked. A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... trust. That magical thing crypto users keep trying to keep decentralized. But when development of the currency is centralized... and at the end of the day, someone is the owner of the git repo... you can't decentralize the implementation of the currency. So what we see instead is enthusiasts putting their faith and trust in the sense of the developers of their chosen coin pretty much to the bitter end. You can fork these currencies - like Bitcoin Cash succeeded in doing for the most part - but you won't steal their mindshare or userbase to any major degree. They will stick to the original client or see that particular chain abandoned entirely. Doge and so many other coins died to negligent or exploitative developers and whomever that someone is thats proposing to take over is an unknown, at least less trusted quantity. So most would jump ship than take the chance, so coins either stay under one development process or die completely with no real middle ground.

opnitro 8y ago
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm This paper is ever important when trying to come up with technical solutions to societal organization.
- joakimbr 8y ago
  Fascinating reading. Thank you for this article!
- vnorilo 8y ago
  I am shocked at how true that rings even though my circumstances are so different from hers. Thank you for linking!
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Oh this is the article about feminist organizations? Yes, that was a fantastic read, and I always use it when I want to argue against flat organizations, it's very compelling.

shittyadmin 8y ago

> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mistakes, they proved how centralized Ethereum was - anyone who believed it was a truly decentralized network left at that point.

Iv 8y ago
And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.
- wpietri 8y ago
  But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
  - stanleydrew 8y ago
    Decentralization matters to a few enthusiasts. Those enthusiasts include the developers of the technology. So the point of these technologies is decentralization, but the "users" of the technologies don't actually care and are hoping to speculate their way to lambo riches. (I put "users" in quotes since there are actually very few true "users", and I'm really just describing people who trade cryptos on exchanges.)
    - wuliwong 8y ago
      My belief is that the recent corporate censorship by large internet companies has created a growing interest in decentralization by some non-technical people. I don't think it is a slam dunk but I do think that currently there is a much greater chance for decentralized applications to gain traction. That being said, I think this new crop of potential users could also buy into new companies that have a centralized architecture but simply market themselves as having an ethos of non-censorship.

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skywhopper 8y ago

It's the ironic twist at the heart of crypto: a centralized system built on implicit trust and community standards is actually required to build a functioning economy. Participating in any particular blockchain is only as valuable as the community around it. So while forking is always an option, a fork will only be worth following if comes with a functional community with agreed-upon standards. So you can (try to) decentralize the process of verifying that everyone is playing fair (whatever that means in your system), but so long as you all want to trade with each other, you must have a centralized authority of some sort, to decide what "playing fair" means.

jpadkins 8y ago
I think this was understood even in the earliest days of bitcoin. The centralized system of "playing fair" was the protocol, which as you point out, is a centralized community standard. Blockchain is independent actors following a common protocol. If the actors don't follow the centralized, common protocol then the economy disintegrates.

nebulous1 8y ago

I think the centralisation issue with most cryptocurrencies is quite interesting. Almost all of them have a generally accepted organization that controls their development. This organization can make large-scale changes but controversial ones usually lead to breakaway forks. Theoretically these forks could be more valuable than the one controlled by the organization. In practice if a fork wants to be successful it's going to need its own organization.

zby 8y ago

This is about making credible commitments, decentralization is a mean to that. What we see here is that the commitments can never be absolutely credible - but maybe that is not too bad, maybe we can live with some relativity.

dlubarov 8y ago

Quoting Vitalik: > If someone puts a gun to my head & tells me to write a hardfork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download & install the update & switch to that chain? I see few raised hands. This is called decentralization. Sure, the Ethereum Foundation has substantial influence in the sense that their proposed changes tend to be adopted, but that's because they tend to propose good changes. If they propose a bad change, chances are the community will reject it. If they propose a questionable/controversial change, chances are the community will fork, as with the DAO fork.

StreamBright 8y ago
This is a joke, not decentralisation.
- amasad 8y ago
  Is it really a joke? Because if this is seen as a valid argument in the Ethereuem community then they've really gone off the deep end.
  - wuliwong 8y ago
    Decentralization is not my area of expertise but I am growing very interested. I've recently been learning a lot more about building decentralized apps using blockchains and distributed file storage. Could you expand a little upon why this is a joke? I understand that it is not describing a good situation but my understanding was that the miners are a part of the decentralizing infrastructure in the way that was described in the quote. Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you suggest some other reading for me on creating decentralized applications not using blockchain. I've wondered myself if it makes much sense that everything would be built on blockchains in the future.
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      Everything is centralized on the internet. People quite often forget that most of the internet backbone is vulnerable to all sort of attacks (BGP hijacking) or even just mass surveillance because most of the traffic is going through few devices. Unless I can directly reach your computer on the network without a 3rd party provider which can deny me that access you can't be seriously thinking about decentralization. Another issue that I see with these projects that claim to be decentralized, for example ipfs.io is that they do not consider worst case scenarios so they cannot have a service level agreements on their service. Most of the customer networks are asymmetric, you have much more bandwidth to download content than to upload so if you are providing services than you are going to saturate your uplink. Nodes can also be turned off, worst case scenario is that all of the nodes are off that has a piece of data that you can't recover from anywhere else. As of everything going to be built on the blockchain in the future, most definitely not. I think 2019 going to wipe out most of the cryptocurrencies and we are going to see very few successful blockchain (or more like distributed ledger) projects succeeding in the corporate space. Maybe there will be some use cases for blockchain/DLT like food traceability (one project i have contributed to) and customer warranty for example but all this hype that everything will be running on blockchain will just fade.

iSnow 8y ago

Fair point, but ETH is not just Mr. Buterin and some close friends deciding to postpone mining winter at will. There are currently 8 groups building ETH implementations (https://www.coindesk.com/next-gen-buidlers-the-8-teams-working-on-ethereum-2-0 https://www.coindesk.com/next-gen-buidlers-the-8-teams-worki...), so you have /some/ level of decentralization since they all have some weight in decisions. Ultimately, the consensus in any classical blockchain HAS to be uniform, and that introduces an element of centralization (via the consensus algorithm used). That has always been true, and the contentious forks of BTC (and lately BCH) with their fights about the ticker symbol, name, and who has the "true vision" have made this pretty clear. Differing minority opinions have to go the hard fork way and hope to build something better.

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decentralised 8y ago

There's a misunderstanding of what decentralisation means. The difficulty bomb is in the code but the node operators (miners, etc) have to chose to upgrade their clients to work with the new fork rules. The decision of which code to run and which chain becomes canonical is in the hands of the community of users and not the developers, despite the Ethereum Foundation having full ownership of the protocol development process.

celticninja 8y ago

Ethereum is not decentralised. The hard fork after the DAO hack proved that. Combined with its limitless supply it's pretty much pointless in its current incarnation.

rsynnott 8y ago

As you'd probably expect, the answer is that it isn't meaningfully decentralised. Nor is bitcoin, by the way.

menzoic 8y ago

> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable. It just means that power and responsibility is distriubted to many. > I'm a total dilettante in crypto but if something is decentralized you can't make large-scale changes to it at the drop of a hat. Exactly, you're correct. It's not easy for these changes to actually take effect. It takes a majority of miners to vote for and adopt any change/fork. The miners are the ones who are running the decentralized network. Even miners who vote for the change can choose to not upgrade their software to the new version. > Imagine how much coordination effort it takes to change TCP/IP or HTTP This is why I'm amazed at the skill of the Bitcoin & Ethereum team's ability to continue upgrading a platform that has no central control.

jki275 8y ago
The miners have zero incentive to ever let it go to proof of stake, as the instant they do they lose their income stream. So the "snooze button" as they call it, is pretty much guaranteed to keep getting pushed.
rcxdude 8y ago
The power of the miners is overblown: the mining power follows the price/value of the coin, not the other way around, and the price is determined by the users transacting on it, not the miners (though the miners can of course try to interfere with the users ability to transact, but this generally pushes the price down).
splintercell 8y ago
> Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable. It is also impossible to create immutable software.

arisAlexis 8y ago

One word. Consensus. Ethereum is not ready yet. When it is ready it will be decentralised. Still, miners need to agree for the hard fork and if they don't just like Ethereum Classic they can split. Protocol changes in blockchain projects are about consensus.

vinniejames 8y ago

Like TCP/IP or HTTP, Blockchains are a specification. You can easily change How HTTP works on your own server, as can the core devs on a blockchain project. None of that actually matters until clients begin using the new features/blockchain software en masse, that's where the decentralized piece fits in

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

BTC should have done this as well.

anonu 8y ago

Ethereum is - as the founders have repeated - very much an experiment and still in "beta". The currency aspect of Ethereum is even more of an experiment. So invest/trade/speculate at your own risk.