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Ethereum Services Are Centralized

togilvie 5y ago
This is a really bad take, with a limited understanding of how Ethereum nodes and smart contracts operate. I clicked hoping for more...
Animats 5y ago
How many miners control 51% of the Etherium hash rate? That's the key issue. For Bitcoin, it was at one time 5, all in China, and there's a group photo.
- wmf 5y ago
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10699.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10699.pdf
treelovinhippie 5y ago
Was expecting to find a mention of Metamask and Infura. They both run on AWS and are the infrastructure bridges powering the majority of dApps. Oh and 50% of both are owned by Joe Lubin. So without mentioning mining/staking pool centralization, you've got centralization of both infrastructure and ownership.
seibelj 5y ago
Decentralization is a spectrum. A truly decentralized network, one pure from every angle of analysis, does not exist. Ethereum itself is more decentralized than all traditional value-transfer networks of the old centralized financial world, and the applications built on top of Ethereum are also a spectrum of decentralization.
- lottin 5y ago
  How do you measure decentralisation?
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Using decentralized analytics.
    - lottin 5y ago
      But how do you measure it? What is the degree of centralisation of the "traditional value-transfer networks of the old centralized financial world" (your words)? You said it was greater than that of the ethereum network so you must have measured both.
      - fleddr 5y ago
        They were not my words, I was merely inserting a lame joke. As far as I know, there's no technical metric to measure decentralization, instead it's something to reason about, as it can touch many aspects. However, if you insist on finding a key aspect that indicates how centralized or decentralized a protocol is, the answer typically lies in nodes. How many are there and more importantly, how accessible is it to run your own? With Bitcoin, anybody can run their own node, even on modest hardware. With Ethereum, considering the future PoS switch, only rich people can run a node, unless you join a pool. The minimum ETH required is 32 ETH, which make it an elite thing. Worse, those elites will get even more ETH as a reward. This doesn't necessarily mean ethereum is not decentralized at all, just less so compared to Bitcoin. A worst example may be ICP (Internet Computer) where running your own node is close to impossible.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Obviously there's no such thing as 100% pure decentralization. I don't even know what that would look like. So it's not really worth the time trying to classify systems based on some theoretical purity rating. It doesn't gain us anything.
politician 5y ago
Is Medium playing games with browser history? When clicking the back button after clicking "read more" it kept refreshing the same page. I hate when sites do that.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  Medium has a lot of dark patterns by now - like seriously they expect me to pay perpetually to read somebody’s random rants? Needing to login or register just read something etc I’ve moved my blog off Medium a long time ago to ensure the content stays in the open for free
- sva_ 5y ago
  This lightweight 'wrapper' around Medium was on HN today: https://scribe.rip/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized-nor-trustworthy-f43c0a19a400 https://scribe.rip/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized...
crazydoggers 5y ago
This lacks an understanding of how Ethereum contracts can function. He’s assuming that a single person or entity must own a contract, and that’s not true. That’s the whole point of DeFi. Uniswap is a great example, which is a fully decentralized exchange.
- dboreham 5y ago
  It can be true. Investors obviously need to understand this and beware.
rgovostes 5y ago
Meta: Unsure what is happening on the front page today. This isn't even a link to the article[1], and somehow it rocketed to #10 in under an hour. A nearly 2-year-old announcement about SHA-1, posted 20 minutes ago, is in 3rd place. 1: https://michaelgummelt.medium.com/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized-nor-trustworthy-f43c0a19a400 https://michaelgummelt.medium.com/crypto-services-are-neithe...
- crazydoggers 5y ago
  I may be wrong, but I’ve felt for a while that there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. There’s always a lot of strong downvotes or upvotes for specific subjects, but not that many voices in comments to go with them.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Agreed; though I always assumed it was the touch of the HN editorial voice.
  - burnished 5y ago
    You could also just be doing real-time sentiment analysis of the readers of hackernews right? I wonder how you'd prove or disprove this. I know I get a similar feeling lately about Reddit, that some topics seem to be machine generated due to pretty surprising typos (not the existence of them, but the kinds, and not the kinds you get used to from ESL students).
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. Something I've noticed spending time online is that people tend to really over-estimate when this is actually happening. These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Regardless, your comment is against HN rules.
    - crazydoggers 5y ago
      Why should it be against the rules to openly discuss these issues in a thoughtful manner? That kind of silence would only encourage proliferation of the rings since no one is allowed to talk about it. It’s one thing to just randomly spout accusations, but if a number of users are seeing consistent problems, I think people and mods would want to know. Anyway, see my other reply to dang. If you search on Twitter you’ll see rando accounts posting weird formated links to HN articles, and things auto posting to HN, etc etc. I avoid Facebook alltogether, but I can only imagine there’s more of the same. > These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Don’t we know for a fact that social media sites have been and are targets of influence campaigns? ie. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/facebook-bans-media-consultancy-running-troll-farm-pro-trump-youth-group/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/faceboo... Since 2016 these issues have rightly had more light shined on them. It’s better that people at least discuss openly that social media is being targeted and gamed for money than have us all stick our heads in the sand.
bob229 5y ago
Crypto/blockchain is garbage without a use case. Stop wasting our time
carlosdp 5y ago
Echoing the other comments, this is a pretty naive understanding of how a general purpose smart contract blockchain works and the incentive models involved that keep the kind of censorship described here from happening. They also don't seem to fully grasp how smart contracts that are in-fact decentralized work, and are cherry-picking the ones that have an authoritarian controller because of the nascency of the technology. The article isn't really detailed at all, so it's hard to know where to start with why these "services" aren't in fact "centralized." It's effectively the equivalent of someone saying "you can't keep your password secure from hackers if you store it in a database, if someone hacks it then they can steal it and use every site you used that password on": it's just obviously false to people who know how this works, but now I have to explain how hashing works and such. I'd just encourage reading up on how Ethereum transaction mining works before just taking the article's claims at face value.
- Gwarzo 5y ago
  I do not have any comment to make on the validity of the article, but this comment made me think of exactly why I dislike todays censorship friendly media so much. I can read the article, gather my initial thoughts and come to some sensible comments within that articles posting to further navigate. If this article is garbage, the way to dispense with it is with comments such as these. (I'm not making any claim to the validity or lack-thereof of the article)
- mgummelt 5y ago
  Author here. I would have fleshed this out more if I knew this was going to reach the front page. Yes, many smart contracts are deployed with distributed upgrade mechanisms, and I mention them briefly at the end of the post. I mostly wrote this to start a conversation with friends about a) how many internet services can be practically operated with the friction that such upgrade mechanisms create, and b) the potential to use the blockchain only for the voting protocol, then to sign and deploy the service on a traditional cloud.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Might be worth comparing to The Update Framework and Sigstore
joelbondurant 5y ago
Ethereum can be replaced by MongoDB.
spicybright 5y ago
This will likely be controversial, but tech like bitcoin is a big step backwards from payment systems we currently have. All the rules and regulations were created because someone was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent something from happening again. Block chain money loses all of those protections to stop a bad actor from, say, a hacker draining your wallet with no recourse. So we find ourselves back to step one. I do think it's inevitable layers of regulations and rules will crop up, either from governments, or power holders requiring layers of smart contracts to respect transactions. It will just be a matter of time till the modern banking systems "port" themselves onto the chain.
- beambot 5y ago
  I'm always reminded of articles like this: > Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can't Account For $21 Trillion https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-s-treasuries-beware-uncle-sam-cant-account-for-21-trillion/?sh=4d2cc0aa7644 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-... > Fed Committed $7.77 Trillion To Rescue Banks [in 2008, previously undisclosed] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/28/142854391/report-fed-committed-7-77-trillion-to-rescue-banks#:~:text=Report%3A%20Fed%20Committed%20%247.77%20Trillion,%3A%20The%20Two%2DWay%20%3A%20NPR&text=Hourly%20News-,Report%3A%20Fed%20Committed%20%247.77%20Trillion%20To%20Rescue%20Banks%20%3A%20The%20Two,request%20was%20submitted%20by%20Bloomberg https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/28/142854391.... You can argue whether this is a bug versus benefit... but transparency seems like a general win.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    I forget the source but I once heard a quote that really resonated with me "corruption festers in the dark but tends to evaporate once it's brought to light". With that said, imagine a government where you can audit every transaction they make...
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  > All the rules and regulations were created because someone was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent something from happening again. No, not how things happened at all. > bitcoin is a big step backwards from payment systems we currently have. Please share with the class the open PKI digital ledger that anyone can use with no permission "we" currently have.
betwixthewires 5y ago
> Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute. This is the crux of the point, and as far as I'm aware is incorrect. A transaction to change a smart contract must be signed, a node cannot modify a transaction. A miner can in theory refuse a transaction to change a contract, but the only way to reliably prevent a change is a 51% attack. A node could refuse to accept a change, but it would fork the network and the node would be running a non canonical chain, which makes it pointless.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  Since MEV is a thing, miners have a lot of power.
robcohen 5y ago
As other commenters have said, this article largely appears naive on how contracts work. Looking past that, the main thrust of the argument is that if "the market" wants things like chargebacks and censorship, then there will exist large blockchain "startups" that fulfill that need. They also make the argument that such a progression is likely inevitable. What they fail to understand is that is not important. What is important is that blockchain enables people to vote through their choices. If they prefer decentralization, they can have that. If they prefer centralized features, they can have that. Until blockchain, it wasn't even possible to have the choice of decentralization because it simply technologically didn't exist. Crypto-hopefulls believe this choice will better society. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But even a subset of society can benefit from having more choices. Just because your candidate loses doesn't invalidate the benefits of having a democracy.
deleted 5y ago
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cryptica 5y ago
The basic premise is true. Ethereum nodes do not provide even basic search/querying features out of the box so you have to rely on centralized services to index the blockchain data for querying. So if you want to build anything useful which integrates with Ethereum in any way, you need to trust a centralized service provider to accurately report the data... I was shocked when I tried to integrate with Ethereum for the first time. It almost seems as though they have made it difficult to integrate with on purpose. It's been over a decade. Couldn't they have written some kind of open source service which exposes the Ethereum node's data via a simple REST HTTP API? This would not be a difficult project to implement.
- eco 5y ago
  What data were you looking for? geth provides a JSON RPC interface. Ethereum is general purpose so you'll need to know how a particular contract works to get information out of it but some contracts adhere to standards like ERC-20. Ethereum launched six years ago, by the way (not a decade).
  - cryptica 5y ago
    Does geth provide a basic search/querying feature? For example like searching for a list of transactions sent to and from a specific account. But doesn't geth require me to setup and sync my own Ethereum node from scratch? I heard it consumes 300GB minimum. It would be great if I could just query some random node on testnet for example for testing my service before I commit to launching a node.
    - dboreham 5y ago
      There are schemes for verifiable query services against the chain (e.g. VulcanizeDB) but most folks seem to just connect to someone else's node and hope it answers truthfully.
      - cryptica 5y ago
        I feel that they should promote this more. Not everyone can afford to sync their own 300GB DB... Especially for testing. As a developer, I want to test things with someone else's backend before I even bother setting up my own.
woah 5y ago
This blog post is pure nonsense. Nobody can alter an Ethereum smart contract unless they control all full nodes, or can convince all full node operators to install a fork of the software that reaches into the database and modifies that contract. It is possible for smart contracts to contain code that allows them to update themselves when receiving a message signed by a certain key, but if this is the case, then it is obvious to anyone inspecting the contract. Most heavily used Ethereum contracts such as Uniswap and Compound for example do not contain any updating code because users do not trust it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arisAlexis 5y ago
  Compound had a huge bug which lead to the CEO (lol decentralized) to threaten users that got the airdropped tokens he will report them to the IRS. This is decadence at the highest level of this "new era".
  - everfree 5y ago
    Robert Leshner backpedaled on that statement later that same day, telling everyone that what he said was "bone-headed". > I'm trying to do anything I can to help the community get some of its COMP back, and this was a bone-headed tweet / approach. That's on me. > Luckily, the community is much bigger, and smarter, than just me. > I appreciate your ridicule and support. > — Robert Leshner (@rleshner) October 1, 2021
- spinny 5y ago
  I read quite a lot of smart contract code, both on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. It seems to more common on BSC the deployment using the upgradable proxy pattern. This is probably because is more attractive to incoming devs (lower fees, faster) and this seem to be encouraged in tutorials and such. Upgradeble proxy contracts with an active admin completely change the premise of a decentralized service. At that point it's just using the blockchain as a database, which is the worst choice of db for a centralized service
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Find people that are skeptical about the benefits of blockchains/cryptocurrencies AND have a strong technical understand is so rare. This is not one of them. So far the best person that has that intersection I have found is Angela Walsh.
newacct583 5y ago
This wasn't making sense to me, then I got to the meat: > The real risk is that blockchain Twitter will begin to censor dubiously defined “hate speech”, or that blockchain Mastercard will add support for chargebacks. This is just culture warism. In fact moderated discussion forums[1] and reversible payments are DESIRED FEATURES of products in the real world. Of course that's going to happen. But to the author that constitutes "centralization", but what it really means is "not the libertarian utopia I imagined". [1] We're posting on one!
xrd 5y ago
This is pure garbage: "Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have no reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they have relatively little stake in the success of individual contracts or their ecosystems."
- jude- 5y ago
  Why censor them, when you can just reorder and front-run them instead to maximize your MEV?
factorialboy 5y ago
The moment a small group of people bailed out their friends' DAO, Ethereum lost all credibility. I am referring to: https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#section-the-response-to-the-dao-hack https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec... Since then Eth has proved to be a successful investment, so this is not a commentary on the performance of this digital asset. But rather a comment on the false immutable, decentralized claims of this blockchain.
- thebean11 5y ago
  They didn't do so unilaterally. The users of Ethereum collectively chose to bail it out.
  - sva_ 5y ago
    More or less: > On 15 July 2016, a short notice on-chain vote was held on the DAO hard fork.[8] Of the 82,054,716 ETH in existence, only 4,542,416 voted, for a total voter turn out of 5.5% of the total supply on 16 July 2016; 3,964,516 ETH (87%) voted in favor, 1/4 of which came from a single address, and 577,899 ETH (13%) opposed the DAO fork.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#Carbon_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#Carbon_vote
    - thebean11 5y ago
      Regardless of the vote participants had the choice of staying on the old chain. The fact that they didn't shows the fork was widely supported.
  - mountainboy 5y ago
    not all of them. Hence the eth classic fork. A majority of eth miners and users decided to change the rules and ignore the promises of immutability previously made to all. Having a majority does not make an action ethical. Hence the term: tyranny of the majority. This serious breach of faith soured many people on the project, and the mis-trust continues to this day.
Geee 5y ago
True decentralization means that every end user can choose which version of the software they want to run and how the software runs. This is only possible if they can run the software on their own hardware, in the event that they don't agree with the remote service provider. That's why general purpose blockchains like Ethereum are doomed to fail. They can never be both competitive with centralized trust-based services and lightweight enough to be run by end users.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Ethereum researchers have worked very hard to meet both requirements, for exactly that reason. You can run the beacon chain plus execution node on very modest hardware, and L1 scaling will be based on sharding to keep it modest. It's looking like L2 scaling will end up mostly zkrollups, which are easy for modest clients to verify. The only heavyweight hardware then would be zkrollup block producers, who could potentially engage in censorship, but the nice thing about zkrollups is that users have a cryptographic guarantee that they can exit with their funds without a waiting period. All this together would take Ethereum well into transaction rates comparable to legacy banking.
dwmbt 5y ago
after reading the article and some comments, i thought i would comment my own grievance with the article. i think there is a disconnect between the quantifiable trust a blockchain offers and the authors interpretation. specifically, he mentions that "the code these nodes are running is available for anyone to inspect (trust)" and that "smart contracts can be trusted to a large extent because they operate in the open, are kept in check by the ecosystem, and even often have voting protocols in place to govern changes." yeah, that's actually a good enough explanation of what's going on there. yet, this doesn't seem to be enough for the author. i guess my biggest annoyance is that they seem to think a smart contract is just a series of if/else conditionals that can be ported onto an AWS instance.
dabedee 5y ago
Not to remove from some of the valid concerns made in the article, but I find it ironic that a post decrying centralization of Ethereum services is written on Medium.
- mgummelt 5y ago
  I'm actually not taking a pro or anti centralization stance. I'm only pointing out that many services people think have decentralized power in fact don't.
vmception 5y ago
There are plenty of smart contracts where the admin destroyed their access, and where the admin never had any privileged access. Are people so out of touch on this topic that they would ask "source?" after being presented with negative information that matched what they wanted to read
nootropicat 5y ago
>If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. Utter nonsense, contracts can be both immutable and mutable. There's inbuilt owner capability, code has to explicitly implement upgrade capability. All nodes do is run code. Uniswap for example has no upgrade capability.
- nootropicat 5y ago
  >There's inbuilt owner capability should have been "no inbuilt owner capability". Noticed this too late to edit
vmception 5y ago
Odd and inaccurate take. Some or many services have admin control. But it doesn't matter. If you are exchanging time for food and shelter, you need to be building smart contracts. That's where we are right now, it is the most lucrative use of time possible. Put down the Shopify widget development book, put down the dropshipping tutorial, and start deploying smart contracts.
russellbeattie 5y ago
The post is mostly nonsense, but that said, I'm always astounded by how few nodes there are out there. Checking now and there's just 2,713 of them - though this number is low because of a bug in the latest software which removed thousands in September for some reason. It's never been higher than 7,000 or so. How long would it take you to write a script which DDOS all of them? How many are run by organizations which can protect against attacks? My guess is not enough. Considering the amount of money relying on those measly ~3k servers out there? It's truly frightening.
- dboreham 5y ago
  The soft underbelly. That said there are people building dedicated networks for blockchain node connectivity (similar to the data transit networks run by Google, Amazon et al). Private lightpath.
modeless 5y ago
> If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. This is only true if the contract specifically allows that, right? And that's disclosed in the contract itself. So if you don't want that, don't use that contract.
ojr 5y ago
Ethereum enthusiast are quick to disagree, the author of the article might not have a deep understanding of how everything works but headline of the article holds somewhat true. Metamask is a centralized service with centralized team, if Google removed this extension from Chrome as they temporarily did before, it would make adoption for new users harder. Open Sea has centralized operators, the orderbook is not on the blockchain I believe. Uniswap the "decentralized exchange" has acentralized team with vc funding and registration with the SEC. Infura is another centralized service, that so many Ethereum projects depend on. It is hard to call these services decentralized. Although the small mainstream success of these services and markets, show that fully decentralization is probably not needed for most mainstream users.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Uniswap is completely decentralized. Uniswap Labs cannot prevent any one from listing any token on the Uniswap smart contract, or prevent any one from setting up their own frontend to access it.
  - ojr 5y ago
    take out the uniswap frontend, the volume will not be as high, without Coinbase the price of Ethereum would be significantly lower
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      Oh yes definitely. But there are numerous other front-ends available. People can even run their own front-end locally. People generally don't because so far there has been little need. The option to use other front-ends, and the inability of any central authority to shut down the Uniswap smart contract, is what makes it censorship resistant.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      The uniswap frontend is mirrored on IPFS. It's stateless (it pulls the current state from Ethereum RPCs)
- 5y ago
trident5000 5y ago
Price is going up. Looks like its time for the daily anti-crypto articles on HN now.
samaman 5y ago
To respond to the title: yes, yes they are, if you consider how many live in infura or an AWS geth instance and/or quorum by JPM. Doesn't mean its not a better means for data security...just that yes, the publisher of said smart contract can just replace or change to contract if they really wanted to if it were not part of the mainnet. There are many infura nodes though that are part of the mainnet, so that's unlikely unless some company just forced all users to their own ETH network.
aazaa 5y ago
> But this [knowing that an internet service will behave exactly as advertised] fails to hold true for general purpose chains acting as a VM, including the front-runner Ethereum. Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have no reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they have relatively little stake in the success of individual contracts or their ecosystems. If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. Ethereum is blockchain AWS. The author fails to define "VM" here. The only thing that makes sense is "Virtual Machine," which is a thing, but only barely makes sense in this context. The fact that node operators have little incentive or ability to inspect or reject changes to contracts beyond what the protocol dictates isn't a problem in itself. That is, after all, the entire idea. Code is law. It doesn't matter how desperately a single miner might want to change the rules. At least in principle. This is more of a problem on systems like Bitcoin where miners of side chains literally have no knowledge, from the protocol itself, of what the hashes representing transactions on other chains mean. The bigger problem, not addressed in this article, is that the vast majority of things you want to do to make a block chain useful outside of financial transactions requires something called an "oracle." What does that NFT actually secure? Go consult the oracle. Want to know the exchange rate of some non-ethereum token? Go ask the oracle. Want to know what that land title says? Go ask the oracle. The problem is that an oracle is just a server. Maybe it's a group of servers - doesn't matter. Servers are corruptible in ways that Ethereum is not (or at least should not be) through hash chains and proof-of-work. Servers use logins, admins, and undocumented security procedures. And they offer little protection against Sybil attack.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I think we need to start being more specific than "decentralized". My critique of most crypto projects is that they aren't partition tolerant. Does that mean that they aren't decentralized? I don't know. I'd love a taxonomy of decentralization techniques so I can say: "crypto project X has decentralization characteristics Y and Z, but only Y is consistent with its stated mission so it's less viable then project W which... But instead we just decentralize=good centralize=bad and continue with politics as usual.
- judge2020 5y ago
  It's like how Git is decentralized. Yes, it is indeed decentralized and that has enabled a lot of interop (eg. git push heroku) but for anything public, people want a nice way to view code, have the README front and center, etc. so they often prefer their main datastore be GitHub or GitLab. It helps that they do some maintenance automatically for you, eg. garbage collection and effectively guaranteeing you won't lose data (besides when the services break and it's down for $x hours).
thesausageking 5y ago
>If trust on the blockchain boils down to trust in a mere social system, what has been gained? This has already happened once when the original DAO project got hacked and the community decided to undo all of those transactions with a fork. The changes on chain were completely valid from a code point of view, but the community around the project decided to undo it.
chmsky00 5y ago
It’s centralized in that the developers are now bankers; we have to trust and empower them with a Byzantine abstraction to do daily routine? We’ve already seen how that worked with bankers. Nope. I’m really looking forward to the day computer science folks finally accept if it involves human participation it will come along with human bias. Biology has not gone anywhere, folks. We cannot decouple ourselves from this existence and be information; yet? Maybe. For sure not now. And networks like Ethereum are not going to enable that. It may be a nice and clean abstract in their head, but everyone has that privilege. Bringing people aboard Ethereum is putting a new cognitive burden on people. But the goal is to not do that? Environment issues aside, blockchain is like nuclear powered rocket car hype and not anywhere near as cool. I’ll stick to a Wireguard tunnel between people I trust literally before running this stuff for a bunch of randos profiting big off my effort.

This is a really bad take, with a limited understanding of how Ethereum nodes and smart contracts operate. I clicked hoping for more...

Animats 5y ago

How many miners control 51% of the Etherium hash rate? That's the key issue. For Bitcoin, it was at one time 5, all in China, and there's a group photo.

wmf 5y ago
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10699.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10699.pdf

treelovinhippie 5y ago

Was expecting to find a mention of Metamask and Infura. They both run on AWS and are the infrastructure bridges powering the majority of dApps. Oh and 50% of both are owned by Joe Lubin. So without mentioning mining/staking pool centralization, you've got centralization of both infrastructure and ownership.

seibelj 5y ago

Decentralization is a spectrum. A truly decentralized network, one pure from every angle of analysis, does not exist. Ethereum itself is more decentralized than all traditional value-transfer networks of the old centralized financial world, and the applications built on top of Ethereum are also a spectrum of decentralization.

lottin 5y ago
How do you measure decentralisation?
- fleddr 5y ago
  Using decentralized analytics.
  - lottin 5y ago
    But how do you measure it? What is the degree of centralisation of the "traditional value-transfer networks of the old centralized financial world" (your words)? You said it was greater than that of the ethereum network so you must have measured both.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      They were not my words, I was merely inserting a lame joke. As far as I know, there's no technical metric to measure decentralization, instead it's something to reason about, as it can touch many aspects. However, if you insist on finding a key aspect that indicates how centralized or decentralized a protocol is, the answer typically lies in nodes. How many are there and more importantly, how accessible is it to run your own? With Bitcoin, anybody can run their own node, even on modest hardware. With Ethereum, considering the future PoS switch, only rich people can run a node, unless you join a pool. The minimum ETH required is 32 ETH, which make it an elite thing. Worse, those elites will get even more ETH as a reward. This doesn't necessarily mean ethereum is not decentralized at all, just less so compared to Bitcoin. A worst example may be ICP (Internet Computer) where running your own node is close to impossible.
spicybright 5y ago
Obviously there's no such thing as 100% pure decentralization. I don't even know what that would look like. So it's not really worth the time trying to classify systems based on some theoretical purity rating. It doesn't gain us anything.

politician 5y ago

Is Medium playing games with browser history? When clicking the back button after clicking "read more" it kept refreshing the same page. I hate when sites do that.

xchaotic 5y ago
Medium has a lot of dark patterns by now - like seriously they expect me to pay perpetually to read somebody’s random rants? Needing to login or register just read something etc I’ve moved my blog off Medium a long time ago to ensure the content stays in the open for free
sva_ 5y ago
This lightweight 'wrapper' around Medium was on HN today: https://scribe.rip/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized-nor-trustworthy-f43c0a19a400 https://scribe.rip/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized...

crazydoggers 5y ago

This lacks an understanding of how Ethereum contracts can function. He’s assuming that a single person or entity must own a contract, and that’s not true. That’s the whole point of DeFi. Uniswap is a great example, which is a fully decentralized exchange.

dboreham 5y ago
It can be true. Investors obviously need to understand this and beware.

rgovostes 5y ago

Meta: Unsure what is happening on the front page today. This isn't even a link to the article[1], and somehow it rocketed to #10 in under an hour. A nearly 2-year-old announcement about SHA-1, posted 20 minutes ago, is in 3rd place. 1: https://michaelgummelt.medium.com/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized-nor-trustworthy-f43c0a19a400 https://michaelgummelt.medium.com/crypto-services-are-neithe...

crazydoggers 5y ago
I may be wrong, but I’ve felt for a while that there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. There’s always a lot of strong downvotes or upvotes for specific subjects, but not that many voices in comments to go with them.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Agreed; though I always assumed it was the touch of the HN editorial voice.
- burnished 5y ago
  You could also just be doing real-time sentiment analysis of the readers of hackernews right? I wonder how you'd prove or disprove this. I know I get a similar feeling lately about Reddit, that some topics seem to be machine generated due to pretty surprising typos (not the existence of them, but the kinds, and not the kinds you get used to from ESL students).
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. Something I've noticed spending time online is that people tend to really over-estimate when this is actually happening. These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Regardless, your comment is against HN rules.
  - crazydoggers 5y ago
    Why should it be against the rules to openly discuss these issues in a thoughtful manner? That kind of silence would only encourage proliferation of the rings since no one is allowed to talk about it. It’s one thing to just randomly spout accusations, but if a number of users are seeing consistent problems, I think people and mods would want to know. Anyway, see my other reply to dang. If you search on Twitter you’ll see rando accounts posting weird formated links to HN articles, and things auto posting to HN, etc etc. I avoid Facebook alltogether, but I can only imagine there’s more of the same. > These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing. Don’t we know for a fact that social media sites have been and are targets of influence campaigns? ie. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/facebook-bans-media-consultancy-running-troll-farm-pro-trump-youth-group/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/faceboo... Since 2016 these issues have rightly had more light shined on them. It’s better that people at least discuss openly that social media is being targeted and gamed for money than have us all stick our heads in the sand.

bob229 5y ago

Crypto/blockchain is garbage without a use case. Stop wasting our time

carlosdp 5y ago

Echoing the other comments, this is a pretty naive understanding of how a general purpose smart contract blockchain works and the incentive models involved that keep the kind of censorship described here from happening. They also don't seem to fully grasp how smart contracts that are in-fact decentralized work, and are cherry-picking the ones that have an authoritarian controller because of the nascency of the technology. The article isn't really detailed at all, so it's hard to know where to start with why these "services" aren't in fact "centralized." It's effectively the equivalent of someone saying "you can't keep your password secure from hackers if you store it in a database, if someone hacks it then they can steal it and use every site you used that password on": it's just obviously false to people who know how this works, but now I have to explain how hashing works and such. I'd just encourage reading up on how Ethereum transaction mining works before just taking the article's claims at face value.

Gwarzo 5y ago
I do not have any comment to make on the validity of the article, but this comment made me think of exactly why I dislike todays censorship friendly media so much. I can read the article, gather my initial thoughts and come to some sensible comments within that articles posting to further navigate. If this article is garbage, the way to dispense with it is with comments such as these. (I'm not making any claim to the validity or lack-thereof of the article)
mgummelt 5y ago
Author here. I would have fleshed this out more if I knew this was going to reach the front page. Yes, many smart contracts are deployed with distributed upgrade mechanisms, and I mention them briefly at the end of the post. I mostly wrote this to start a conversation with friends about a) how many internet services can be practically operated with the friction that such upgrade mechanisms create, and b) the potential to use the blockchain only for the voting protocol, then to sign and deploy the service on a traditional cloud.
- verdverm 5y ago
  Might be worth comparing to The Update Framework and Sigstore

joelbondurant 5y ago

Ethereum can be replaced by MongoDB.

spicybright 5y ago

This will likely be controversial, but tech like bitcoin is a big step backwards from payment systems we currently have. All the rules and regulations were created because someone was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent something from happening again. Block chain money loses all of those protections to stop a bad actor from, say, a hacker draining your wallet with no recourse. So we find ourselves back to step one. I do think it's inevitable layers of regulations and rules will crop up, either from governments, or power holders requiring layers of smart contracts to respect transactions. It will just be a matter of time till the modern banking systems "port" themselves onto the chain.

beambot 5y ago
I'm always reminded of articles like this: > Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can't Account For $21 Trillion https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-s-treasuries-beware-uncle-sam-cant-account-for-21-trillion/?sh=4d2cc0aa7644 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-... > Fed Committed $7.77 Trillion To Rescue Banks [in 2008, previously undisclosed] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/28/142854391/report-fed-committed-7-77-trillion-to-rescue-banks#:~:text=Report%3A%20Fed%20Committed%20%247.77%20Trillion,%3A%20The%20Two%2DWay%20%3A%20NPR&text=Hourly%20News-,Report%3A%20Fed%20Committed%20%247.77%20Trillion%20To%20Rescue%20Banks%20%3A%20The%20Two,request%20was%20submitted%20by%20Bloomberg https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/28/142854391.... You can argue whether this is a bug versus benefit... but transparency seems like a general win.
- serverholic 5y ago
  I forget the source but I once heard a quote that really resonated with me "corruption festers in the dark but tends to evaporate once it's brought to light". With that said, imagine a government where you can audit every transaction they make...
fidesomnes 5y ago
> All the rules and regulations were created because someone was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent something from happening again. No, not how things happened at all. > bitcoin is a big step backwards from payment systems we currently have. Please share with the class the open PKI digital ledger that anyone can use with no permission "we" currently have.

betwixthewires 5y ago

> Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute. This is the crux of the point, and as far as I'm aware is incorrect. A transaction to change a smart contract must be signed, a node cannot modify a transaction. A miner can in theory refuse a transaction to change a contract, but the only way to reliably prevent a change is a 51% attack. A node could refuse to accept a change, but it would fork the network and the node would be running a non canonical chain, which makes it pointless.

warkdarrior 5y ago
Since MEV is a thing, miners have a lot of power.

robcohen 5y ago

As other commenters have said, this article largely appears naive on how contracts work. Looking past that, the main thrust of the argument is that if "the market" wants things like chargebacks and censorship, then there will exist large blockchain "startups" that fulfill that need. They also make the argument that such a progression is likely inevitable. What they fail to understand is that is not important. What is important is that blockchain enables people to vote through their choices. If they prefer decentralization, they can have that. If they prefer centralized features, they can have that. Until blockchain, it wasn't even possible to have the choice of decentralization because it simply technologically didn't exist. Crypto-hopefulls believe this choice will better society. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But even a subset of society can benefit from having more choices. Just because your candidate loses doesn't invalidate the benefits of having a democracy.

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cryptica 5y ago

The basic premise is true. Ethereum nodes do not provide even basic search/querying features out of the box so you have to rely on centralized services to index the blockchain data for querying. So if you want to build anything useful which integrates with Ethereum in any way, you need to trust a centralized service provider to accurately report the data... I was shocked when I tried to integrate with Ethereum for the first time. It almost seems as though they have made it difficult to integrate with on purpose. It's been over a decade. Couldn't they have written some kind of open source service which exposes the Ethereum node's data via a simple REST HTTP API? This would not be a difficult project to implement.

eco 5y ago
What data were you looking for? geth provides a JSON RPC interface. Ethereum is general purpose so you'll need to know how a particular contract works to get information out of it but some contracts adhere to standards like ERC-20. Ethereum launched six years ago, by the way (not a decade).
- cryptica 5y ago
  Does geth provide a basic search/querying feature? For example like searching for a list of transactions sent to and from a specific account. But doesn't geth require me to setup and sync my own Ethereum node from scratch? I heard it consumes 300GB minimum. It would be great if I could just query some random node on testnet for example for testing my service before I commit to launching a node.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    There are schemes for verifiable query services against the chain (e.g. VulcanizeDB) but most folks seem to just connect to someone else's node and hope it answers truthfully.
    - cryptica 5y ago
      I feel that they should promote this more. Not everyone can afford to sync their own 300GB DB... Especially for testing. As a developer, I want to test things with someone else's backend before I even bother setting up my own.

woah 5y ago

This blog post is pure nonsense. Nobody can alter an Ethereum smart contract unless they control all full nodes, or can convince all full node operators to install a fork of the software that reaches into the database and modifies that contract. It is possible for smart contracts to contain code that allows them to update themselves when receiving a message signed by a certain key, but if this is the case, then it is obvious to anyone inspecting the contract. Most heavily used Ethereum contracts such as Uniswap and Compound for example do not contain any updating code because users do not trust it.

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arisAlexis 5y ago
Compound had a huge bug which lead to the CEO (lol decentralized) to threaten users that got the airdropped tokens he will report them to the IRS. This is decadence at the highest level of this "new era".
- everfree 5y ago
  Robert Leshner backpedaled on that statement later that same day, telling everyone that what he said was "bone-headed". > I'm trying to do anything I can to help the community get some of its COMP back, and this was a bone-headed tweet / approach. That's on me. > Luckily, the community is much bigger, and smarter, than just me. > I appreciate your ridicule and support. > — Robert Leshner (@rleshner) October 1, 2021
spinny 5y ago
I read quite a lot of smart contract code, both on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. It seems to more common on BSC the deployment using the upgradable proxy pattern. This is probably because is more attractive to incoming devs (lower fees, faster) and this seem to be encouraged in tutorials and such. Upgradeble proxy contracts with an active admin completely change the premise of a decentralized service. At that point it's just using the blockchain as a database, which is the worst choice of db for a centralized service

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

Find people that are skeptical about the benefits of blockchains/cryptocurrencies AND have a strong technical understand is so rare. This is not one of them. So far the best person that has that intersection I have found is Angela Walsh.

newacct583 5y ago

This wasn't making sense to me, then I got to the meat: > The real risk is that blockchain Twitter will begin to censor dubiously defined “hate speech”, or that blockchain Mastercard will add support for chargebacks. This is just culture warism. In fact moderated discussion forums[1] and reversible payments are DESIRED FEATURES of products in the real world. Of course that's going to happen. But to the author that constitutes "centralization", but what it really means is "not the libertarian utopia I imagined". [1] We're posting on one!

xrd 5y ago

This is pure garbage: "Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have no reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they have relatively little stake in the success of individual contracts or their ecosystems."

jude- 5y ago
Why censor them, when you can just reorder and front-run them instead to maximize your MEV?

factorialboy 5y ago

The moment a small group of people bailed out their friends' DAO, Ethereum lost all credibility. I am referring to: https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#section-the-response-to-the-dao-hack https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec... Since then Eth has proved to be a successful investment, so this is not a commentary on the performance of this digital asset. But rather a comment on the false immutable, decentralized claims of this blockchain.

thebean11 5y ago
They didn't do so unilaterally. The users of Ethereum collectively chose to bail it out.
- sva_ 5y ago
  More or less: > On 15 July 2016, a short notice on-chain vote was held on the DAO hard fork.[8] Of the 82,054,716 ETH in existence, only 4,542,416 voted, for a total voter turn out of 5.5% of the total supply on 16 July 2016; 3,964,516 ETH (87%) voted in favor, 1/4 of which came from a single address, and 577,899 ETH (13%) opposed the DAO fork.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#Carbon_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#Carbon_vote
  - thebean11 5y ago
    Regardless of the vote participants had the choice of staying on the old chain. The fact that they didn't shows the fork was widely supported.
- mountainboy 5y ago
  not all of them. Hence the eth classic fork. A majority of eth miners and users decided to change the rules and ignore the promises of immutability previously made to all. Having a majority does not make an action ethical. Hence the term: tyranny of the majority. This serious breach of faith soured many people on the project, and the mis-trust continues to this day.

Geee 5y ago

True decentralization means that every end user can choose which version of the software they want to run and how the software runs. This is only possible if they can run the software on their own hardware, in the event that they don't agree with the remote service provider. That's why general purpose blockchains like Ethereum are doomed to fail. They can never be both competitive with centralized trust-based services and lightweight enough to be run by end users.

DennisP 5y ago
Ethereum researchers have worked very hard to meet both requirements, for exactly that reason. You can run the beacon chain plus execution node on very modest hardware, and L1 scaling will be based on sharding to keep it modest. It's looking like L2 scaling will end up mostly zkrollups, which are easy for modest clients to verify. The only heavyweight hardware then would be zkrollup block producers, who could potentially engage in censorship, but the nice thing about zkrollups is that users have a cryptographic guarantee that they can exit with their funds without a waiting period. All this together would take Ethereum well into transaction rates comparable to legacy banking.

dwmbt 5y ago

after reading the article and some comments, i thought i would comment my own grievance with the article. i think there is a disconnect between the quantifiable trust a blockchain offers and the authors interpretation. specifically, he mentions that "the code these nodes are running is available for anyone to inspect (trust)" and that "smart contracts can be trusted to a large extent because they operate in the open, are kept in check by the ecosystem, and even often have voting protocols in place to govern changes." yeah, that's actually a good enough explanation of what's going on there. yet, this doesn't seem to be enough for the author. i guess my biggest annoyance is that they seem to think a smart contract is just a series of if/else conditionals that can be ported onto an AWS instance.

dabedee 5y ago

Not to remove from some of the valid concerns made in the article, but I find it ironic that a post decrying centralization of Ethereum services is written on Medium.

mgummelt 5y ago
I'm actually not taking a pro or anti centralization stance. I'm only pointing out that many services people think have decentralized power in fact don't.

vmception 5y ago

There are plenty of smart contracts where the admin destroyed their access, and where the admin never had any privileged access. Are people so out of touch on this topic that they would ask "source?" after being presented with negative information that matched what they wanted to read

nootropicat 5y ago

>If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. Utter nonsense, contracts can be both immutable and mutable. There's inbuilt owner capability, code has to explicitly implement upgrade capability. All nodes do is run code. Uniswap for example has no upgrade capability.

nootropicat 5y ago
>There's inbuilt owner capability should have been "no inbuilt owner capability". Noticed this too late to edit

vmception 5y ago

Odd and inaccurate take. Some or many services have admin control. But it doesn't matter. If you are exchanging time for food and shelter, you need to be building smart contracts. That's where we are right now, it is the most lucrative use of time possible. Put down the Shopify widget development book, put down the dropshipping tutorial, and start deploying smart contracts.

russellbeattie 5y ago

The post is mostly nonsense, but that said, I'm always astounded by how few nodes there are out there. Checking now and there's just 2,713 of them - though this number is low because of a bug in the latest software which removed thousands in September for some reason. It's never been higher than 7,000 or so. How long would it take you to write a script which DDOS all of them? How many are run by organizations which can protect against attacks? My guess is not enough. Considering the amount of money relying on those measly ~3k servers out there? It's truly frightening.

dboreham 5y ago
The soft underbelly. That said there are people building dedicated networks for blockchain node connectivity (similar to the data transit networks run by Google, Amazon et al). Private lightpath.

modeless 5y ago

> If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. This is only true if the contract specifically allows that, right? And that's disclosed in the contract itself. So if you don't want that, don't use that contract.

ojr 5y ago

Ethereum enthusiast are quick to disagree, the author of the article might not have a deep understanding of how everything works but headline of the article holds somewhat true. Metamask is a centralized service with centralized team, if Google removed this extension from Chrome as they temporarily did before, it would make adoption for new users harder. Open Sea has centralized operators, the orderbook is not on the blockchain I believe. Uniswap the "decentralized exchange" has acentralized team with vc funding and registration with the SEC. Infura is another centralized service, that so many Ethereum projects depend on. It is hard to call these services decentralized. Although the small mainstream success of these services and markets, show that fully decentralization is probably not needed for most mainstream users.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Uniswap is completely decentralized. Uniswap Labs cannot prevent any one from listing any token on the Uniswap smart contract, or prevent any one from setting up their own frontend to access it.
- ojr 5y ago
  take out the uniswap frontend, the volume will not be as high, without Coinbase the price of Ethereum would be significantly lower
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Oh yes definitely. But there are numerous other front-ends available. People can even run their own front-end locally. People generally don't because so far there has been little need. The option to use other front-ends, and the inability of any central authority to shut down the Uniswap smart contract, is what makes it censorship resistant.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    The uniswap frontend is mirrored on IPFS. It's stateless (it pulls the current state from Ethereum RPCs)
5y ago

trident5000 5y ago

Price is going up. Looks like its time for the daily anti-crypto articles on HN now.

samaman 5y ago

To respond to the title: yes, yes they are, if you consider how many live in infura or an AWS geth instance and/or quorum by JPM. Doesn't mean its not a better means for data security...just that yes, the publisher of said smart contract can just replace or change to contract if they really wanted to if it were not part of the mainnet. There are many infura nodes though that are part of the mainnet, so that's unlikely unless some company just forced all users to their own ETH network.

aazaa 5y ago

> But this [knowing that an internet service will behave exactly as advertised] fails to hold true for general purpose chains acting as a VM, including the front-runner Ethereum. Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have no reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they have relatively little stake in the success of individual contracts or their ecosystems. If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run it. Ethereum is blockchain AWS. The author fails to define "VM" here. The only thing that makes sense is "Virtual Machine," which is a thing, but only barely makes sense in this context. The fact that node operators have little incentive or ability to inspect or reject changes to contracts beyond what the protocol dictates isn't a problem in itself. That is, after all, the entire idea. Code is law. It doesn't matter how desperately a single miner might want to change the rules. At least in principle. This is more of a problem on systems like Bitcoin where miners of side chains literally have no knowledge, from the protocol itself, of what the hashes representing transactions on other chains mean. The bigger problem, not addressed in this article, is that the vast majority of things you want to do to make a block chain useful outside of financial transactions requires something called an "oracle." What does that NFT actually secure? Go consult the oracle. Want to know the exchange rate of some non-ethereum token? Go ask the oracle. Want to know what that land title says? Go ask the oracle. The problem is that an oracle is just a server. Maybe it's a group of servers - doesn't matter. Servers are corruptible in ways that Ethereum is not (or at least should not be) through hash chains and proof-of-work. Servers use logins, admins, and undocumented security procedures. And they offer little protection against Sybil attack.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

I think we need to start being more specific than "decentralized". My critique of most crypto projects is that they aren't partition tolerant. Does that mean that they aren't decentralized? I don't know. I'd love a taxonomy of decentralization techniques so I can say: "crypto project X has decentralization characteristics Y and Z, but only Y is consistent with its stated mission so it's less viable then project W which... But instead we just decentralize=good centralize=bad and continue with politics as usual.

judge2020 5y ago
It's like how Git is decentralized. Yes, it is indeed decentralized and that has enabled a lot of interop (eg. git push heroku) but for anything public, people want a nice way to view code, have the README front and center, etc. so they often prefer their main datastore be GitHub or GitLab. It helps that they do some maintenance automatically for you, eg. garbage collection and effectively guaranteeing you won't lose data (besides when the services break and it's down for $x hours).

thesausageking 5y ago

>If trust on the blockchain boils down to trust in a mere social system, what has been gained? This has already happened once when the original DAO project got hacked and the community decided to undo all of those transactions with a fork. The changes on chain were completely valid from a code point of view, but the community around the project decided to undo it.

chmsky00 5y ago

It’s centralized in that the developers are now bankers; we have to trust and empower them with a Byzantine abstraction to do daily routine? We’ve already seen how that worked with bankers. Nope. I’m really looking forward to the day computer science folks finally accept if it involves human participation it will come along with human bias. Biology has not gone anywhere, folks. We cannot decouple ourselves from this existence and be information; yet? Maybe. For sure not now. And networks like Ethereum are not going to enable that. It may be a nice and clean abstract in their head, but everyone has that privilege. Bringing people aboard Ethereum is putting a new cognitive burden on people. But the goal is to not do that? Environment issues aside, blockchain is like nuclear powered rocket car hype and not anywhere near as cool. I’ll stick to a Wireguard tunnel between people I trust literally before running this stuff for a bunch of randos profiting big off my effort.