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Comment by v_p_n_p_v | Hacker News Reader

What's amazing to me is that if you want to find any of these decentralized systems, you have to trust some centralized entity identifying them as the true system. For example, want to download MetaMask? How will you find it? Google MetaMask and trust that Google will have filtered out all the fake MetaMask wallets set up to steal your money. Want to lend money on a DeFi platform like Anchor? Again, Google and hope to God their fake counterpart didn't figure out how to fake its way to the top of the SER page. People have lost tons of money this way.

If only there was a trustless, decentralized, immutable, database of sorts that could be used as the source of truth... thegraph.com supposedly wants to do this, but it wants me to connect my wallet and again I'm not sure I'm on the "right" website...

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Proof of Work is the source of truth [0]. That is why Proof of Stake cannot work. You are describing one of the biggest of the problems with PoS perfectly.

[0] https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/

The source of truth is the website you trust to vend you unadulterated node software; the source of truth is not Proof of Work itself. Once you define the trust problem to include the initial software download, the trust assumptions are not so different at all, as explained by Vitalik:

> Essentially, the first time a node comes online, and any subsequent time a node comes online after being offline for a very long duration (ie. multiple months), that node must find some third-party source to determine the correct head of the chain. This could be their friend, it could be exchanges and block explorer sites, the client developers themselves, or many other actors. PoW does not have this requirement.

> However, arguably this is a very weak requirement; in fact, users need to trust client developers and/or "the community" to about this extent already. At the very least, users need to trust someone (usually client developers) to tell them what the protocol is and what any updates to the protocol have been. This is unavoidable in any software application. Hence, the marginal additional trust requirement that PoS imposes is still quite low.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

> What's amazing to me is that if you want to find any of these decentralized systems, you have to trust some centralized entity identifying them as the true system. For example, want to download MetaMask? How will you find it? Google MetaMask and trust that Google

Or I go directly to my friend's website that has a link to MetaMask's because I trust him.

Anecdata about thegraph:

There's a blockchain prediction market that relies on thegraph for some functionality in an attempt to make every aspect DeFi, but the performance is just garbage to the point where it should be unacceptable for real money trading.

I don't think your typical YC startup would find delivering a product in this state for public use as acceptable, but the startup behind it was flush with VC cash.

How would you ever be able to trust such a trustless, decentralized database? Wouldn't all the same problems that you addressed with Google appear again?

With google, the most notable difference seems to be that it is big enough (due its single entry point nature) that people invest in gaming it.

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