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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

> It is great to see effort being put into researching cleaner alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no working PoS-based system that does not rely on some degree of centralization in its security model.

This is false. See Algorand, Cardano, Mina, etc.

Proof-of-work is very much a technology of the past. It's the fossil fuel of cryptocurrencies.

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Additionally, Algorand has pledged [1] to be carbon-negative.

[1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno...

Algorand isn't currently decentralized. They have a list of approx 100 relays required for the network to function that they control tied to a centralized single domain.

Do you have a good source on that? This is not the first time I hear this. Btw I’ve studied the consensus protocol and it fulfills promises of decentralization so I’m wondering why they are using some single points of failure pieces (it is decentralized from a safety perspective: you can’t double spend, but it’s possible that some pieces are centralized). My guess is efficiency.

https://algorand.foundation/faq

Who manages the list of relay nodes? What about decentralization?

> Currently, the Algorand Foundation manages the official list of relay nodes...

> We are working on a model where the decisions on relay nodes will be done in a more decentralized way.

As for the centralized domain, you can look it up in the source code but essentially it gets the list of relays from a SRV record on the algorand.network domain:

_algobootstrap._tcp.mainnet.algorand.network

Ok I see. In practice this reminds me of the issue of downloading the client and of seed peers that every cryptocurrency has:

- everyone downloads the client/code of a cryptocurrency from the same place

- that client also hardcodes a list of peers that you first connect to in order to discover more peers

The first issue is more problematic, and the second issue usually matters less.

My guess is that algorand rely on relay nodes because they are targeting a high throughput, and thus need quick communication between nodes.

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