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> Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions. Any attempted tampering would be highly visible a

> Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions. Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in their valuable asset?

once_inc 4y ago
If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.
  - once_inc 4y ago
    Agreed, but the big mining pools and stakeholders went with ETH, and with its minority hash rate, ETC died a slow death.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      It is about what people were willing to spend money to buy. Not the miners
      - lmm 4y ago
        Nah, it was about what the big name exchanges annointed, and that was decided by a cabal in which the big miners were significant players.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    "Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful of massive players using their control to avoid the consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail" dynamics in traditional finance. With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum. Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets. So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders? True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going. [1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/ https://etherscan.io/accounts/
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Ethereum, like any financial instrument, has always been valued by willingness to pay. It is unavoidable that willingness to pay is impacted more by those with more wealth. You cannot sell an asset if nobody wants to buy it and people with money can buy things. If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were misled.
      - ineedasername 4y ago
        My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual level with banks is significantly higher than anything I'd have with crypto. All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field. It is not the democratization of money & finance that proponents & crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative to the proposed revolution) features that might offer improvements on the traditional systems. And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional financial systems into the hands of the people and all sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find such crypto evangelicals. But no I have __never__ been misled by them. It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls massively short of promises made.
ineedasername 4y ago
I'm not talking about tampering, not in the sense of a 51% double spend or anything. I'm talking about off-chain real world human influence. I'm talking about things like The DAO, an organization that was such a huge player in ethereum at the time that when they suffered an exploit like so many others have over the years ethereum did a hard fork for just them to fix things. How many smaller players in the crypto scene have received that kind white glove treatment, going against the "code is law" principle, when they've lost huge sums of money? Code was law right up until The DAO massively screwed up and was deemed Too Big to Fail. No different than traditional financial institutions. As the mining resources of the various trustless Proof of $X models needed to makes crypto work are increasingly centralized into the hands of massive players in the field the principle of crypto democratizing control of money & finance is becoming an Emperor With [increasingly] No Clothes.

once_inc 4y ago

If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".

whimsicalism 4y ago
If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.
- once_inc 4y ago
  Agreed, but the big mining pools and stakeholders went with ETH, and with its minority hash rate, ETC died a slow death.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    It is about what people were willing to spend money to buy. Not the miners
    - lmm 4y ago
      Nah, it was about what the big name exchanges annointed, and that was decided by a cabal in which the big miners were significant players.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  "Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful of massive players using their control to avoid the consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail" dynamics in traditional finance. With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum. Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets. So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders? True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going. [1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/ https://etherscan.io/accounts/
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Ethereum, like any financial instrument, has always been valued by willingness to pay. It is unavoidable that willingness to pay is impacted more by those with more wealth. You cannot sell an asset if nobody wants to buy it and people with money can buy things. If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were misled.
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual level with banks is significantly higher than anything I'd have with crypto. All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field. It is not the democratization of money & finance that proponents & crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative to the proposed revolution) features that might offer improvements on the traditional systems. And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional financial systems into the hands of the people and all sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find such crypto evangelicals. But no I have __never__ been misled by them. It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls massively short of promises made.

ineedasername 4y ago

I'm not talking about tampering, not in the sense of a 51% double spend or anything. I'm talking about off-chain real world human influence. I'm talking about things like The DAO, an organization that was such a huge player in ethereum at the time that when they suffered an exploit like so many others have over the years ethereum did a hard fork for just them to fix things. How many smaller players in the crypto scene have received that kind white glove treatment, going against the "code is law" principle, when they've lost huge sums of money? Code was law right up until The DAO massively screwed up and was deemed Too Big to Fail. No different than traditional financial institutions. As the mining resources of the various trustless Proof of $X models needed to makes crypto work are increasingly centralized into the hands of massive players in the field the principle of crypto democratizing control of money & finance is becoming an Emperor With [increasingly] No Clothes.