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This will be a great test of how decentralized the ethereum ecosystem actually is.

swalsh 4y ago
Decentralization is not a singular thing, different aspects of crypto are decentralized others are known to not be. Everyone knows BTC is decentralized, but WBTC is not, but BTC.b probably is. Virtually anything dealing with real-world resources will eventually involve trust and centralization. The US Government has a monopoly on regulating dollars, and if you want to touch dollars legally, you're going to have to comply with their regulations. But having a relationship with a centralized power authority does not negate the entire thing. Framing this in the context of centralized vs decentralized is wrong. This discussion is more like a discussion of foreign policy. You can think of blockchains as independent sovereignties. They are purely digital economies with a type of digital natural capital, human capital etc, it also has imports, and exports. To import dollars there must exist a relationship with the US Government, and framing this as a negotiation is more practical than framing it as a technical discussion. We're talking about governece here. Tech is irrelevent. At the end of the day, if crypto wants a better footing, it would benefit from self-regulating itself a bit to gain increased favor with it's foreign trade partners. It would also benefit from increasing it's exports to gain leverage, the trade imbalance that exists today is not doing it any favors.
- rufusroflpunch 4y ago
  I agree, that's why I specified the ethereum ecosystem, not just the protocol. For instance, Infura and MetaMask have already blacklisted the OFAC addresses, and those services are critical to the workflows of MANY services in the ecosystem.
  - nootropicat 4y ago
    Metamask didn't blacklist these addresses. https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/commits/develop https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/commits/devel...
    - rufusroflpunch 4y ago
      Maybe I misunderstood, but I saw this on twitter: https://twitter.com/0xdev0/status/1556933551073153024 https://twitter.com/0xdev0/status/1556933551073153024 It says they blocked RPC requests from TornadoCrash, and that MM could no longer access Tornado Cash funds.
      - nootropicat 4y ago
        Metamask is a browser addon, infura is an external rpc service. You can use metamask to connect to a different rpc.

Decentralization is not a singular thing, different aspects of crypto are decentralized others are known to not be. Everyone knows BTC is decentralized, but WBTC is not, but BTC.b probably is. Virtually anything dealing with real-world resources will eventually involve trust and centralization. The US Government has a monopoly on regulating dollars, and if you want to touch dollars legally, you're going to have to comply with their regulations. But having a relationship with a centralized power authority does not negate the entire thing. Framing this in the context of centralized vs decentralized is wrong. This discussion is more like a discussion of foreign policy. You can think of blockchains as independent sovereignties. They are purely digital economies with a type of digital natural capital, human capital etc, it also has imports, and exports. To import dollars there must exist a relationship with the US Government, and framing this as a negotiation is more practical than framing it as a technical discussion. We're talking about governece here. Tech is irrelevent. At the end of the day, if crypto wants a better footing, it would benefit from self-regulating itself a bit to gain increased favor with it's foreign trade partners. It would also benefit from increasing it's exports to gain leverage, the trade imbalance that exists today is not doing it any favors.

rufusroflpunch 4y ago
I agree, that's why I specified the ethereum ecosystem, not just the protocol. For instance, Infura and MetaMask have already blacklisted the OFAC addresses, and those services are critical to the workflows of MANY services in the ecosystem.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  Metamask didn't blacklist these addresses. https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/commits/develop https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/commits/devel...
  - rufusroflpunch 4y ago
    Maybe I misunderstood, but I saw this on twitter: https://twitter.com/0xdev0/status/1556933551073153024 https://twitter.com/0xdev0/status/1556933551073153024 It says they blocked RPC requests from TornadoCrash, and that MM could no longer access Tornado Cash funds.
    - nootropicat 4y ago
      Metamask is a browser addon, infura is an external rpc service. You can use metamask to connect to a different rpc.