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Solana was centralized in a bunch of really obvious ways, and if you were taken in by Solana, I strongly suggest that you gain an understanding of what was cent

Solana was centralized in a bunch of really obvious ways, and if you were taken in by Solana, I strongly suggest that you gain an understanding of what was centralized about Solana before investing in any crypto again. This has happened before and will likely happen again. If you're investing in crypto without understanding what decentralization is, you're investing in things you fundamentally don't understand, which is always a poor choice. What worries me more about this is that companies like Coinbase listed Solana at all. I think that Coinbase does understand decentralization and knew Solana was centralized, so listing a centralized coin shows that they're not committed to decentralization.

sanjayio 4y ago
I couldn't agree more. There were so many signals that Solana was bad technology. There were times when transactions were down and times were out of sync. This should never happen with decentralized technology. There are no devs on PagerDuty to fix these issues when they occur, neither should we want devs to have the ability to put up or down a decentralized technology. I stayed and plan on staying very far from Solana.
- nailer 4y ago
  Bugs exist in all tech decentralised or otherwise. Banking systems go down, Visa goes down, Twitter goes down, HN goes down. Sol has never gone down for some serious unfixable design flaw: rather a bug gets discovered and fixed. That’s how scalable systems using new architectures are built. If one of the less active chains handled Solana’s volume they’d occasionally have had issues too. Also Solana has been pretty damn reliable of late despite doing more volume than ever before: https://status.solana.com/uptime https://status.solana.com/uptime
  - virtualritz 4y ago
    If a bug in a purportedly decentralized system can bring the entire system down/to a halt, this very fact refutes the claim and shows that the system has a – drumrolls – central point of failure.
    - nailer 4y ago
      I don't think you've worked on distributed systems before. Consensus algorithms do not solve bugs. Say, being human, and a software author, you didn't anticipate a node with a single ID producing two valid blocks (someone's blue/green setup went active/active). Yes, one could say that you should have anticipated a single node producing two valid blocks and programmed defensively. I would argue that many people would not have, and even if they did, they would not anticipate other potential bugs. This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever. You can read cause and effects of the outages, including the one above, here: https://status.solana.com/history https://status.solana.com/history
      - kerkeslager 4y ago
        > Consensus algorithms do not solve bugs. Not yet, but that's definitely an open problem that needs good solutions, and bugs aren't an excuse for allowing centralization. The "solution" to bugs being used by Ethereum is simply: move very slowly and try very hard to not create bugs in the first place. But others, i.e. Polkadot, are trying to come up with ways of reaching consensus around reverting or patching bugs. > I would argue that many people would not have, and even if they did, they would not anticipate other potential bugs. Well, tough shit. This isn't a space with room for errors, certainly not ones this big. > This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever. It does mean it's centralized. If you are skeptical that it's even possible to avoid bugs, well yeah, me too. That's why crypto is a high-risk space: bugs aren't really acceptable, but so far we really haven't found a way to completely avoid them.
        nailer 4y ago
        > This isn't a space with room for errors, certainly not ones this big. It is. Comparable systems can and do have errors. You can attach a bunch of nines as an SLA there and Solana would do pretty well in the last months. Especially because it’s only competition in the scalable blockchain space is itself. > > This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever. > It does mean it's centralized. ok.
biztos 4y ago
Why should Coinbase be committed to decentralization?
- chejazi 4y ago
  Centralized projects are more likely to be deemed securities. If that were to happen with a coin Coinbase actively trades, they would be in legal trouble.
  - willmadden 4y ago
    The idea behind Solana was and is fantastic. Designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go. This is what Bitcoin was originally meant to do before its development roadmap was diverted from the original plans of Satoshi and to a lesser extend Gavin. There's nothing technically centralized about Solana, but the early VC funding and later support by FTX and SBF was unfortunate.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      No, you're completely wrong. Maybe designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go, but that's not "the idea behind Solana". There are like 30 chains trying that, many which predate Solana. Tron was trying to do that before Solana was even an idea. It's not clear to me what "the idea behind Solana" is, beyond a bunch of buzzwords which aren't even unique. I see very little in their goals that differentiates Solana from chains like Avalanche or Near, but both of those are better designed technically and more decentralized. And there absolutely is something technically centralized about Solana. Multiple times before it was even listed on Coinbase, it was stopped and restarted by the developers. That should not be possible on a decentralized system. Period. I implore you to recognize that you do not know what you are talking about, and stop confidently spreading misinformation. If you were taken in by Solana, recognize that investing in Solana was an obvious, avoidable mistake. If it wasn't obvious to you, it's because you're severely undereducated with regards to cryptocurrencies to be investing in them. I don't mean that to be rude--it's just that I don't want to be unclear. The people who invested in Solana weren't making educated decisions, they were gambling.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
The FTX-Solana playbook is going to be repeated by Aptos and Sui, and likely, Aleo. They’ve all raised way too much money from VCs to ever run in a truly decentralized fashion.
- rvz 4y ago
  > run in a truly decentralized fashion. We all know there is absolutely no such thing as "true decentralization" in crypto. Then I expect this to be repeated for Polygon, Algorand and Flow then. Out of all of those, Polygon is the most centralized chain pumped by VCs out of all them. I won't be surprised to see another hack and silent emergency upgrade via a centralized multi-sig of devs to fix this VC funded chain [0]. [0] https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-recent-network-upgrade https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-t...
SilverBirch 4y ago
I wouldn't worry about Coinbase, whilst SBF was the cool kid who had a motorbike and smoked round the back of the bike sheds, Coinbase is the kid sat at the back of the class eating glue. Coinbase is doing all of the things required to run a crypto exchange as if you were actually a real exchange trading items of value. The problem is there are no crypto assets of value, and so Coinbase looks perpetually behind the ball, because their trading volumes are nothing, their costs are high, and they move incredibly slowly. They've spent their entire time as a company looking stupid because they don't show crazy trading volumes or magical new markets that are going to drive incredible revenue. Instead, they got valued as an also-ran in the market, people thinking "Oh well they're no FTX but they're worth something". The problem they face today, is is turns out all the guys they looked unsuccessful next to turned out to be bare faced liars. So now people look at Coinbase and realise it's not a business. We thought they were doing a poor job of capturing a brilliant market. Actually they've done a great job building a company to a serve a market that simply never existed and was all pretend.
- gjvc 4y ago
  Coinbase is losing money hand over fist, even while doing everything right.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > I wouldn't worry about Coinbase, whilst SBF was the cool kid who had a motorbike and smoked round the back of the bike sheds, Coinbase is the kid sat at the back of the class eating glue. Coinbase is doing all of the things required to run a crypto exchange as if you were actually a real exchange trading items of value. Why is it that crypto bros think this sort of metaphor-that-doesn't-explain-anything is persuasive? Or do you actually think that a company being "cool" is important in this context? Crypto is a space where you want to move slowly. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here because "break things" causes full-scale collapse. Coinbase is the largest exchange in a Western country and as such is a market leader--definitely not an also-ran. You may be looking for "crazy trading volumes or magical new markets", but anyone who actually knows how to invest knows the risks of those things and is skeptical. > The problem they face today, is is turns out all the guys they looked unsuccessful next to turned out to be bare faced liars. Huh? Why would competitors turning out to be liars be a problem for Coinbase? Also, I'll point out: even if you didn't know FTX were scammers, you had to know that their products were extremely high risk, while Coinbase's products were... still high-risk but at least a coherent choice. Of the crypto scams of this past year I've been taken in by exactly 0 of them because even when they weren't obvious scams, there have always been obvious issues.
rvz 4y ago
It's quite obvious that for years that crypto has geared towards more centralization and it always has been like that and it certainly includes both Bitcoin and Ethereum which have become centralization. There is no true decentralized aspect about crypto. > I think that Coinbase does understand decentralization and knew Solana was centralized, so listing a centralized coin shows that they're not committed to decentralization. Why exactly would a centralized crypto exchange care about decentralization? It has always been a buzzword to get crypto maxis to HODL at high prices and traders, crypto exchanges and VCs to dump on retail.

sanjayio 4y ago

I couldn't agree more. There were so many signals that Solana was bad technology. There were times when transactions were down and times were out of sync. This should never happen with decentralized technology. There are no devs on PagerDuty to fix these issues when they occur, neither should we want devs to have the ability to put up or down a decentralized technology. I stayed and plan on staying very far from Solana.

nailer 4y ago
Bugs exist in all tech decentralised or otherwise. Banking systems go down, Visa goes down, Twitter goes down, HN goes down. Sol has never gone down for some serious unfixable design flaw: rather a bug gets discovered and fixed. That’s how scalable systems using new architectures are built. If one of the less active chains handled Solana’s volume they’d occasionally have had issues too. Also Solana has been pretty damn reliable of late despite doing more volume than ever before: https://status.solana.com/uptime https://status.solana.com/uptime
- virtualritz 4y ago
  If a bug in a purportedly decentralized system can bring the entire system down/to a halt, this very fact refutes the claim and shows that the system has a – drumrolls – central point of failure.
  - nailer 4y ago
    I don't think you've worked on distributed systems before. Consensus algorithms do not solve bugs. Say, being human, and a software author, you didn't anticipate a node with a single ID producing two valid blocks (someone's blue/green setup went active/active). Yes, one could say that you should have anticipated a single node producing two valid blocks and programmed defensively. I would argue that many people would not have, and even if they did, they would not anticipate other potential bugs. This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever. You can read cause and effects of the outages, including the one above, here: https://status.solana.com/history https://status.solana.com/history
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      > Consensus algorithms do not solve bugs. Not yet, but that's definitely an open problem that needs good solutions, and bugs aren't an excuse for allowing centralization. The "solution" to bugs being used by Ethereum is simply: move very slowly and try very hard to not create bugs in the first place. But others, i.e. Polkadot, are trying to come up with ways of reaching consensus around reverting or patching bugs. > I would argue that many people would not have, and even if they did, they would not anticipate other potential bugs. Well, tough shit. This isn't a space with room for errors, certainly not ones this big. > This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever. It does mean it's centralized. If you are skeptical that it's even possible to avoid bugs, well yeah, me too. That's why crypto is a high-risk space: bugs aren't really acceptable, but so far we really haven't found a way to completely avoid them.
      - nailer 4y ago
        > This isn't a space with room for errors, certainly not ones this big. It is. Comparable systems can and do have errors. You can attach a bunch of nines as an SLA there and Solana would do pretty well in the last months. Especially because it’s only competition in the scalable blockchain space is itself. > > This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever. > It does mean it's centralized. ok.

biztos 4y ago

Why should Coinbase be committed to decentralization?

chejazi 4y ago
Centralized projects are more likely to be deemed securities. If that were to happen with a coin Coinbase actively trades, they would be in legal trouble.
- willmadden 4y ago
  The idea behind Solana was and is fantastic. Designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go. This is what Bitcoin was originally meant to do before its development roadmap was diverted from the original plans of Satoshi and to a lesser extend Gavin. There's nothing technically centralized about Solana, but the early VC funding and later support by FTX and SBF was unfortunate.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    No, you're completely wrong. Maybe designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go, but that's not "the idea behind Solana". There are like 30 chains trying that, many which predate Solana. Tron was trying to do that before Solana was even an idea. It's not clear to me what "the idea behind Solana" is, beyond a bunch of buzzwords which aren't even unique. I see very little in their goals that differentiates Solana from chains like Avalanche or Near, but both of those are better designed technically and more decentralized. And there absolutely is something technically centralized about Solana. Multiple times before it was even listed on Coinbase, it was stopped and restarted by the developers. That should not be possible on a decentralized system. Period. I implore you to recognize that you do not know what you are talking about, and stop confidently spreading misinformation. If you were taken in by Solana, recognize that investing in Solana was an obvious, avoidable mistake. If it wasn't obvious to you, it's because you're severely undereducated with regards to cryptocurrencies to be investing in them. I don't mean that to be rude--it's just that I don't want to be unclear. The people who invested in Solana weren't making educated decisions, they were gambling.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

The FTX-Solana playbook is going to be repeated by Aptos and Sui, and likely, Aleo. They’ve all raised way too much money from VCs to ever run in a truly decentralized fashion.

rvz 4y ago
> run in a truly decentralized fashion. We all know there is absolutely no such thing as "true decentralization" in crypto. Then I expect this to be repeated for Polygon, Algorand and Flow then. Out of all of those, Polygon is the most centralized chain pumped by VCs out of all them. I won't be surprised to see another hack and silent emergency upgrade via a centralized multi-sig of devs to fix this VC funded chain [0]. [0] https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-recent-network-upgrade https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-t...

SilverBirch 4y ago

I wouldn't worry about Coinbase, whilst SBF was the cool kid who had a motorbike and smoked round the back of the bike sheds, Coinbase is the kid sat at the back of the class eating glue. Coinbase is doing all of the things required to run a crypto exchange as if you were actually a real exchange trading items of value. The problem is there are no crypto assets of value, and so Coinbase looks perpetually behind the ball, because their trading volumes are nothing, their costs are high, and they move incredibly slowly. They've spent their entire time as a company looking stupid because they don't show crazy trading volumes or magical new markets that are going to drive incredible revenue. Instead, they got valued as an also-ran in the market, people thinking "Oh well they're no FTX but they're worth something". The problem they face today, is is turns out all the guys they looked unsuccessful next to turned out to be bare faced liars. So now people look at Coinbase and realise it's not a business. We thought they were doing a poor job of capturing a brilliant market. Actually they've done a great job building a company to a serve a market that simply never existed and was all pretend.

gjvc 4y ago
Coinbase is losing money hand over fist, even while doing everything right.
kerkeslager 4y ago
> I wouldn't worry about Coinbase, whilst SBF was the cool kid who had a motorbike and smoked round the back of the bike sheds, Coinbase is the kid sat at the back of the class eating glue. Coinbase is doing all of the things required to run a crypto exchange as if you were actually a real exchange trading items of value. Why is it that crypto bros think this sort of metaphor-that-doesn't-explain-anything is persuasive? Or do you actually think that a company being "cool" is important in this context? Crypto is a space where you want to move slowly. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here because "break things" causes full-scale collapse. Coinbase is the largest exchange in a Western country and as such is a market leader--definitely not an also-ran. You may be looking for "crazy trading volumes or magical new markets", but anyone who actually knows how to invest knows the risks of those things and is skeptical. > The problem they face today, is is turns out all the guys they looked unsuccessful next to turned out to be bare faced liars. Huh? Why would competitors turning out to be liars be a problem for Coinbase? Also, I'll point out: even if you didn't know FTX were scammers, you had to know that their products were extremely high risk, while Coinbase's products were... still high-risk but at least a coherent choice. Of the crypto scams of this past year I've been taken in by exactly 0 of them because even when they weren't obvious scams, there have always been obvious issues.

rvz 4y ago

It's quite obvious that for years that crypto has geared towards more centralization and it always has been like that and it certainly includes both Bitcoin and Ethereum which have become centralization. There is no true decentralized aspect about crypto. > I think that Coinbase does understand decentralization and knew Solana was centralized, so listing a centralized coin shows that they're not committed to decentralization. Why exactly would a centralized crypto exchange care about decentralization? It has always been a buzzword to get crypto maxis to HODL at high prices and traders, crypto exchanges and VCs to dump on retail.