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Comment by samoshay | Hacker News Reader

Peer review seems counter to the ethos of blockchain/crypto... no gatekeepers no longer.

Hmm... isn't consensus the inherent ethos of blockchain?

Yeah, but the consensus shouldn’t be held by experts, it should be held by whoever is willing to spend the most money on eth gas fees.

Not sure you meant in jest (if so, ignore me) or just displaying your misunderstanding on how "Consensus" works in computer science and more specifically in blockchains. Here is a starting point if so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)

The short answer is that Ethereum gas fees have nothing to do with consensus in the blockchain Ethereum maintains.

It was satire and take your point on gas fees (I thought eth gas fees sounded funnier than ownership of hash compute share), but the general point is that consensus in blockchains is really controlled by the richest participants (i.e. who can own and run the largest mining rigs and have the highest hash rate) rather than consensus being equal across all participants or held by experts.

The power of your consensus 'vote' is proportional to how rich you are (i.e. how much mine power you have), rather than one-person-one-vote.

> consensus in blockchains is really controlled by the richest participants

I think that remains to be seen. Bitcoin miners have tried to show their "control" over the network by forking the chain (see Bitcoin Cash and other forks) while Bitcoin mainline remained the leader. Ethereum is moving towards PoS even though current miners obviously don't want that. If successful, I think Ethereum will prove the opposite, the network is indeed controlled by it's participants and experts/developers, and not by the miners.

Moving to PoS is still control according to the richest participants - it's just changing the metric from how you measure wealth from 'hash power' to 'amount of eth owned'.

By some measure of “control” I guess. The BCash example is still valid for proof of stake, no matter how rich the miners are users still need to assign the forked chain value.

One person one vote got us the current mess of bad choices in federal Senate elections. The choices suck and are effectively controlled by insider power brokers and lobbyists.

Between direct election of Senate and creation of third central bank, 1913 was a really bad year. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing...

Doesn't seem to stop everyone from converging on centralized platforms like OpenSea (e.g. to prevent auctions of "stolen" NFTs).

Truly, someone producing a proof and that proof being verified by others before acceptance is anthemic to the idea of cryptocurrency.

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