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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 oft

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.

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.