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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding Ethereum you’re right, it’s centralized.

With Bitcoin I run my node and check the incoming transactions with it whenever I make a big money transfer (for outgoing transactions a full node is not really needed, as I don’t care if the network doesn’t accept it as long as my counterparty does).

Running a Bitcoin node is practical (less than a day of running in the background on the first run) if the amount of money is significant.

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Ethereum is only centralized if you dont run your own node. It is as practical to do that as it is a bitcoin node (but not for what the person you replied to was trying to do). This is an absurd distinction, and even if it wasnt absurd or wasnt practical then it is a fixable issue. Because it already has been fixed. Geth has a pruned fast sync client that has everything necessary for consensus, it takes about the amount of space and resources as a bitcoin one.

If we limit ourselves to Bitcoin then we're at a sliver of the web3 ecosystem everyone is casting their hopes upon. And Bitcoin in its current state still seems more like a blockchain working prototype and isn't 'feature-ful' enough to replace centralized finance.

But proof-of-work's energy consumption is what kills Bitcoin for me.

For what it's worth, I consider myself crypto agnostic. If a tech delivers something better then great.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with Web3, they are two different things (web3 is a new term, Bitcoin is a system from 2008)

Bitcoin has a scripting system which gives it some limited smart contract capabilities. If web 3 is about programmable money and ownership I would argue BTC is very much relevant to Web 3.

You can use Bitcoin as a collateral on web3.

Cryptocurrency agnostic — thank you. I'm going to borrow.

I don't necessarily like all of the community, current "leaders" etc — I just know a sticky concept when I see it.

I run an Ethereum node at home just fine. There’s nothing centralized about Ethereum.

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