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Comment by consto | Hacker News Reader

If this is accepted and implemented, could someone explain how Ethereum is a decentralised cryptocurrency?

It's not. The Ethereum foundation will continue to merge EIPs like this that benefit them and their cronies.

The whole ETH/ETC fork was because they messed up the DAO contract, which set a precedent for "code is law, except when it doesn't suit us".

This EIP has not been enacted via a hard fork and from the looks of it doesn't have the required support.

The ETC fork happened very early and affected some large percentage of available tokens - I think 15% or so.

Sorry to sound a bit snarky, but you have a sample size of 1 as evidence. It seems there's a lot of opposition to this EIP so I wouldn't count on it being accepted.

The dirty secret is that cryptocurrency development isn't decentralised; whichever group gets to issue software updates to most users is in charge.

Nope. Users are in charge when they make the choice of which software to use.

And you can always leave your country for another country. Doesn’t make it decentralized.

Well, technically for cryptocurrency it's those users who are mining that get to determine which is the "real" chain and therefore whose currency is worth something and whose is worthless. They get to pick a fork.

Well, the user response if 51% of miners decide to pick a fork that enriches themselves at the expense of users is "alright, I'm done, this cryptocurrency is worthless. Have fun spending electricity to mine these digital bits that don't mean anything."

The users who actually decide which currencies have value are those who are willing to exchange those currencies for things of value - either directly for goods & services, or indirectly through trading it with fiat currencies that you can exchange for goods & services. Like all currencies, Ethereum has no intrinsic value - it's just bits in a bunch of computers across the globe, the same as dollars are these days. Its value comes from peoples' willingness to exchange it for things they do value, which isn't going to be very high if the sellers don't believe it'll be worth something to them in the future.

I guess you could argue that the nodes can reject the hard fork. Decentralization doesn't preclude nodes coming to a consensus to change (or not change) the protocol.

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