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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to be snarky but Vitalik itself is ETH's 51% attack ...

What's the point of decentralized cryptocurrency when it falls down on the hands of one person.

Vitalik is very popular because he is heavily respected. Even with that said he cannot get people to make a controversial change as the overall Ethereum community, not just the miners and core devs, decides whether a new proposal is safe enough.

It's not really in the hands of one person, though. If the community diverges, two chains will be created, and the one will the most value will be considered the 'real' chain.

This already happened once, and the less-popular chain became known as 'Ethereum Classic.' It's still around.

Less-popular and original, interestingly in this case.

"original" is a matter of debate. For example, which chain is the original Bitcoin: BTC or BCH? Prior to the fork, they both share the same history. The community aligned more behind BTC but surely there's a fork of the multiverse somewhere in the space-time continuum where the community rallied behind BCH and gave it more hashing power.

For ETC I don't think there is much debate. The original Ethereum paper and protocol still describes ETC whereas if you want to implement an ETH node that verifies the blockchain you need to write special code to introduce the block containing the collection of transactions reverting the hack.

Both have forked numerous times from when the whitepaper was written.

> For example, which chain is the original Bitcoin: BTC or BCH? Prior to the fork, they both share the same history.

That one is easy to answer: if you get a node running code from before the BTC/BCH split, which chain would it follow? AFAIK, that old node would follow the BTC side, since BCH changed the proof-of-work parameters in a way that wouldn't be accepted by older nodes, while BTC only changed some validation parameters in a way that would still be accepted by older nodes (the older nodes might accept some things which newer nodes would reject, but the older nodes would not reject anything newer nodes would accept, so the current BTC chain should still be seen as valid by older nodes).

At this point Vitalik is one researcher among many. He's taken care to remove himself from the "benevolent dictator" role he had at first.

He is very productive though, and the other researchers and devs tend to find his ideas convincing.

If you look at what Pieter Wuelle is doing, he's also doing amazing work, but when it comes to make decisions, he goes to the background even if he has an opinion.

I don't see the same thing happening to Vitalik. I'm not saying it's a problem, as Ethereum is a different network with different advantages and disadvantages, but he still looks like the final decision maker to me at this point (which is OK for me).

I disagree in factually but I agree in optics and I think him being so active makes it easy to get that impression.

Can you give me an example where he purposefully declined to give his opinion to make sure that people are impartial?

Does this happen in other open source software projects? My understanding is that Linus Torvalds was pretty opinionated as well. Linux is better off for it.

Yes, but Bitcoin is special in that it aims to be as decentralized as possible. Ethereum aims to move fast, that’s why it needs a leader. Both are great projects, and both approaches have tradeoffs.

Does Bitcoin still have one main implementation, which is considered the standard in place of a spec? Because ETH2 has four production implementations, developed by different teams in different languages. ETH1 has two in common use, one written in Go and one in Rust. All open source of course.

If Bitcoin still runs on a single implementation then I'd argue its development is more centralized.

Great response

Nope, and simply I don't believe that matters. If you have a meeting with 100 people that doesn't mean you shouldn't talk just because you organized it. Everyone has a voice and an opportunity to state their ideas and concerns.

"A group of researchers" still doesn't feel like decentralized to me.

“A single species” doesn't feel decentralised, either. You're pumping your intuition rather than considering reality directly.

You're pulling threads here. There's a lot of people involved. And then they still need to convince wallet developers and miners. And then once there's the move to PoS they'll also need to convince the users and stakers (miners removed from equation).

miners vs coders is very decentralized to me :) let the miners have their own chain!

I am one of the maintainers of one of the main implementations of eth2 https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, which runs a large portion of the current network. We are not affiliated with the Ethereum Foundation. Any ideas or changes need to be implemented into code and shipped to users. Development is decentralized, as there are 4 client implementations of eth2 today. Vitalik does not control our code, of course.

From my point of view, burning of transaction fees seems like a good solution and idea. Miners are just being babies. There are risks in all businesses, and miners should be aware and account for such risks. When things don't work out your way, your solution should not be to take down the entire infrastructure that fed you.

This is a tired take, Vitaliks position is not any greater than anyone else and there is nothing stopping anyone who has contributions from having the same level of participation. It is much easier to participate than any other open source project i have been involved in.

Vitalik just happens to be very good at his job, consistently insightful, and a wonderful clear communicator. He contributes a lot because he has a lot to contribute.

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