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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

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
reginold 5y ago
What specifically are folks here reading up on regarding Ethereum? I'm looking for interesting takes, generally growing exhausted from the various eth subreddits, cryptocurrency and bitcoin that are commentary on pricing. Sites like cointelgraph are also just barren of anything interesting. It seems like such an exciting time for cryptocurrency but not seeing the level of rigorous thinking I want. Yeah this article is complete trash. No comment.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Old but good: https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/ https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/ https://decrypt.co/ https://decrypt.co/ is also pretty decent.
- gonehome 5y ago
  Vitalik’s blog posts are probably best. [0] There are also some decent selections here: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ [0]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html
- dogman144 5y ago
  https://blockthreat.substack.com/ https://blockthreat.substack.com/ great security-oriented technical read
- tcgv 5y ago
  I wrote a piece on the topic earlier this year in my blog [1] since I was also interested in learning more on the topic of Ethereum and DeFi, and not interested at all in the speculative take that attracts most people. In my post I write about an open source project I implemented using smart contracts that acts as an options (derivatives) exchange, and all the components required for making it work (ex: stablecoins, price oracles, collateral management, liquidity pools, etc). [1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/02/building-a-decentralized-options-exchange https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/02/building-a-decentralized-o...
- Tenobrus 5y ago
  The /r/ethfinance daily is much more focused on interesting technical and social developments and has a higher level of discourse than any other crypto sub I'm aware of. Still some price talk/memes, but there's some consistently thoughtful and well informed posters there, and I'd recommend checking it out.
34g34g34g 5y ago
Then traditional systems better start attempting to compete.While Western Union charges fees to cover network operating costs for remittances, companies like Strike are leveraging Bitcoin to bring those fees to zero.
Tenoke 5y ago
All things they consider risks are definitely possible and for some of them if regulators or mobs push for them plausible. It's not like there aren't e.g. blacklists already.
aboodman 5y ago
Your comment doesn't address the point of the article. The author isn't talking about Ethereum itself, which they acknowledge up front can comfortably be considered decentralized. The point is smart contracts. They are code, and they have to get updated if there are bugs. How do they get updated? Well, in the simple (and common) case somebody holds the private key and updates it. That's centralization, obviously. You can get arbitrarily complex with how smart contracts are updated. You can have multisig, where 2:3 have to vote to update, or you can have actual voting, or you can even do voting by stakeholder in the contract. But whatever you choose, it's fully a function of the smart contract itself what level of decentralization it achieves, and not at all about Ethereum.
- exo762 5y ago
  Some projects avoid upgrading contracts at all. They deploy a new version, create a new UI and point this new UI to new contracts. Uniswap V2 vs Uniswap V3. This way users are actively opting into new set of contracts.
  - aboodman 5y ago
    This makes sense to me and I think can be considered decentralized. How common are completely immutable contracts though? It seems like for any contract that holds significant value it would be insane to make it immutable, particularly when it's written in a turing complete language like Solidity.
    - exo762 5y ago
      Holders of large amounts of funds often value simplicity. Take old Gnosis Multisig vs new Gnosis Safe. While lots of projects migrated (moved funds) to Gnosis Safe, some are still using old Multisig contract, which was so simple it could be audited by anyone in an hour. Old Gnosis Multisig is immutable and can definitely be considered a huge success.
    - patrickaljord 5y ago
      It's pretty common, the two biggest and most used decentralized exchanges uniswap and sushiswap hold $10.5B and are immutable.

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

reginold 5y ago

What specifically are folks here reading up on regarding Ethereum? I'm looking for interesting takes, generally growing exhausted from the various eth subreddits, cryptocurrency and bitcoin that are commentary on pricing. Sites like cointelgraph are also just barren of anything interesting. It seems like such an exciting time for cryptocurrency but not seeing the level of rigorous thinking I want. Yeah this article is complete trash. No comment.

fleddr 5y ago
Old but good: https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/ https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/ https://decrypt.co/ https://decrypt.co/ is also pretty decent.
gonehome 5y ago
Vitalik’s blog posts are probably best. [0] There are also some decent selections here: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ [0]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html
dogman144 5y ago
https://blockthreat.substack.com/ https://blockthreat.substack.com/ great security-oriented technical read
tcgv 5y ago
I wrote a piece on the topic earlier this year in my blog [1] since I was also interested in learning more on the topic of Ethereum and DeFi, and not interested at all in the speculative take that attracts most people. In my post I write about an open source project I implemented using smart contracts that acts as an options (derivatives) exchange, and all the components required for making it work (ex: stablecoins, price oracles, collateral management, liquidity pools, etc). [1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/02/building-a-decentralized-options-exchange https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/02/building-a-decentralized-o...
Tenobrus 5y ago
The /r/ethfinance daily is much more focused on interesting technical and social developments and has a higher level of discourse than any other crypto sub I'm aware of. Still some price talk/memes, but there's some consistently thoughtful and well informed posters there, and I'd recommend checking it out.

34g34g34g 5y ago

Then traditional systems better start attempting to compete.While Western Union charges fees to cover network operating costs for remittances, companies like Strike are leveraging Bitcoin to bring those fees to zero.

Tenoke 5y ago

All things they consider risks are definitely possible and for some of them if regulators or mobs push for them plausible. It's not like there aren't e.g. blacklists already.

aboodman 5y ago

Your comment doesn't address the point of the article. The author isn't talking about Ethereum itself, which they acknowledge up front can comfortably be considered decentralized. The point is smart contracts. They are code, and they have to get updated if there are bugs. How do they get updated? Well, in the simple (and common) case somebody holds the private key and updates it. That's centralization, obviously. You can get arbitrarily complex with how smart contracts are updated. You can have multisig, where 2:3 have to vote to update, or you can have actual voting, or you can even do voting by stakeholder in the contract. But whatever you choose, it's fully a function of the smart contract itself what level of decentralization it achieves, and not at all about Ethereum.

exo762 5y ago
Some projects avoid upgrading contracts at all. They deploy a new version, create a new UI and point this new UI to new contracts. Uniswap V2 vs Uniswap V3. This way users are actively opting into new set of contracts.
- aboodman 5y ago
  This makes sense to me and I think can be considered decentralized. How common are completely immutable contracts though? It seems like for any contract that holds significant value it would be insane to make it immutable, particularly when it's written in a turing complete language like Solidity.
  - exo762 5y ago
    Holders of large amounts of funds often value simplicity. Take old Gnosis Multisig vs new Gnosis Safe. While lots of projects migrated (moved funds) to Gnosis Safe, some are still using old Multisig contract, which was so simple it could be audited by anyone in an hour. Old Gnosis Multisig is immutable and can definitely be considered a huge success.
  - patrickaljord 5y ago
    It's pretty common, the two biggest and most used decentralized exchanges uniswap and sushiswap hold $10.5B and are immutable.