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I'll bite. > centralized enough to allow for transaction reversal You can argue that the developers held outsized influence over the consensus mechanism early

I'll bite. > centralized enough to allow for transaction reversal You can argue that the developers held outsized influence over the consensus mechanism early in Ethereum's lifecycle. You can also debate their recommendation & push to hard fork to a new ledger that undid the hack. But to argue that it is anywhere close to 'centralized' today is disingenuous at best. It should be impossible for any one agent to change the record, but it is the nature of blockchains that consensus holds as "accepted fact". In the event a blockchain is ever relied upon for anything of social importance, the ability for consensus mechanisms to fork away from "systemic ruin" is a desirable trait. I'm one of the few that argue the DAO Hack was a proof of concept for an ultimately 'required' capability for any critically important blockchain systems.

littlestymaar 5y ago
> But to argue that it is anywhere close to 'centralized' today is disingenuous at best. Ethereum devs have absolute power on ethereum. Things like EIP 1559, or Ethereum 2 illustrate this point really clearly: miners have zero power, neither do full nodes. No matter what the algorithms (which can be patched anytime anyways) say, power is a social thing and in the case of Ethereum, the devs have literally complete power over it. The storage is decentralized, the computation is decentralized, but power clearly isn't (and with PoS, it will become more centralized even on an algorithm point of view).
- DennisP 5y ago
  EIP 1559 was immensely popular among everyone in the community besides miners. The same is true of proof-of-stake.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    With “the community” being the name for a bunch of online forums whose admins are… Ethereum devs. How surprising… The foundational decentralization feature of a cryptocurrency is the fact that the blockchain is edited by a distributed network of competing people: yes I'm talking about the miners. If the miners have no power in your system, then their is no practical decentralization because mining is the only thing actually decentralized in a blockchain!
    - sophrocyne 5y ago
      I’m not arguing that both systems (PoW and PoS) don’t have their issues with some measure of aggregated power, but it’s just a false narrative to say that staking and mining aren’t equally decentralized. The migration to PoS isn’t some rug-pull on miners, they’ve known about it for years. If there was legitimate protest, they’d refuse to adopt new versions that incorporated the ETH kill switch. The reason they haven’t? They have no skin in the game - most are mercenaries for hire, operating through centralized pools, cashing out whatever they mine. PoS is a superior system - more flexibility for decentralized participation (only benefit to pooling is convenience), and dramatically better for the environment at scale. Everyone who holds the asset (I.e. the people who should have the most say in platform operations) have invested in PoS, and want it. It’s widely supported. Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb.
      - littlestymaar 5y ago
        > Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb. I've never said “bitcoin is the way”. Let me be clear, bitcoin is a giant CO2-emmiting turd invented by a libertarian who wanted to bring the gold standard back. But, if you're doing PoS you're not in a permissionless blockchain anymore (since you need to buy staking power), that's it. (And, BTW, if you don't need the sybil-resistance that permissionlessness implies, then you are in the realm of traditional distributed systems and using a blockchain is just path dependency at this point …)
        DennisP 5y ago
        You need to buy mining equipment too. To get the best returns on Bitcoin, you need the connections and scale to buy the latest ASIC hardware from the few manufacturers that make it.
        littlestymaar 5y ago
        Just because bitcoin is bad doesn't mean Ethereum isn't too.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> But to argue that it is anywhere close to 'centralized' today is disingenuous at best. Ethereum devs have absolute power on ethereum. Things like EIP 1559, or Ethereum 2 illustrate this point really clearly: miners have zero power, neither do full nodes. No matter what the algorithms (which can be patched anytime anyways) say, power is a social thing and in the case of Ethereum, the devs have literally complete power over it. The storage is decentralized, the computation is decentralized, but power clearly isn't (and with PoS, it will become more centralized even on an algorithm point of view).

DennisP 5y ago
EIP 1559 was immensely popular among everyone in the community besides miners. The same is true of proof-of-stake.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  With “the community” being the name for a bunch of online forums whose admins are… Ethereum devs. How surprising… The foundational decentralization feature of a cryptocurrency is the fact that the blockchain is edited by a distributed network of competing people: yes I'm talking about the miners. If the miners have no power in your system, then their is no practical decentralization because mining is the only thing actually decentralized in a blockchain!
  - sophrocyne 5y ago
    I’m not arguing that both systems (PoW and PoS) don’t have their issues with some measure of aggregated power, but it’s just a false narrative to say that staking and mining aren’t equally decentralized. The migration to PoS isn’t some rug-pull on miners, they’ve known about it for years. If there was legitimate protest, they’d refuse to adopt new versions that incorporated the ETH kill switch. The reason they haven’t? They have no skin in the game - most are mercenaries for hire, operating through centralized pools, cashing out whatever they mine. PoS is a superior system - more flexibility for decentralized participation (only benefit to pooling is convenience), and dramatically better for the environment at scale. Everyone who holds the asset (I.e. the people who should have the most say in platform operations) have invested in PoS, and want it. It’s widely supported. Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      > Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb. I've never said “bitcoin is the way”. Let me be clear, bitcoin is a giant CO2-emmiting turd invented by a libertarian who wanted to bring the gold standard back. But, if you're doing PoS you're not in a permissionless blockchain anymore (since you need to buy staking power), that's it. (And, BTW, if you don't need the sybil-resistance that permissionlessness implies, then you are in the realm of traditional distributed systems and using a blockchain is just path dependency at this point …)
      - DennisP 5y ago
        You need to buy mining equipment too. To get the best returns on Bitcoin, you need the connections and scale to buy the latest ASIC hardware from the few manufacturers that make it.
        littlestymaar 5y ago
        Just because bitcoin is bad doesn't mean Ethereum isn't too.