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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

“Decentralization” has been the argument ideologues have fallen back on time and again in crypto. It’s never well defined and typically used to oppose policies that would promote low transaction fees or increased transaction throughput. It’s why things like Solana which is focused on massive scale and low fees have found a foothold. Ethereum is repeating the mistakes of Bitcoin

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It’s because if you’re not decentralized, then you don’t need a blockchain.

The gold standard was decentralized. Over a century of monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic goals.

> Over a century of monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic goals.

Or rather it has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with the political or economic goals of those who conceive the monetary policy.

Which often aligns with the people that elect them. Central banking fixes serious flaws in money systems, and provides levers to mitigate disasters caused by external forces.

Compare it to a boat. Central banking gives you the ability to steer, sure someone might be bad at it and lead you into dangerous waters. But decentralized currency is like shooting the helmsman and ripping out the rudder because someone did a bad job of it once.

Decentralized currency is the lifeboat if the captain goes mad and decides to steer into iceberg territory. It's harder to steer, but better than sinking in freezing waters (hyperinflation).

it's "decentralized" in the sense that most anyone can confirm that the bar of gold they are holding is real. Gold being taken out of the ground is literally Proof of the work that was put into it. Exactly why bitcoin takes work

Gold, silver and other metal coins were usually produced by a central (and government-controlled) mint, no? And counterfeit was harshly punished?

The issue is what constitutes a sufficient amount of "decentralization". Extremists who may or may not have ulterior motives seem to oppose any change which by their estimation might decrease the decentralization. They want to minimize the cost of running a full node without consideration for the fact that optimizing that to the extreme causes transaction fees to go parabolic and thus also prices less well off users out of participating in the network and if the fees are too expensive to transact why would you run a full node for a network you can't use. There is no balance in their thinking.

I see you haven't discovered the wonders of ZKRollups yet. Have a read of the works of Polynya [0]. Ethereum will be a settlement layer for these execution chains that can do thousands of TPS at a fraction of the current fee, and their only limit on TPS is data storage, which will be expanded with data shards.

[0] https://polynya.medium.com/

Yeah, I'm aware of that stuff I don't think it will get traction and adds complexity w/o really solving the fundamental problem. My bet is a practical competitor will find a way to balance the different tradeoffs and the winner will be a so called L1 network.

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