Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won’t fix other problems
davidgerard.co.uk
davidgerard.co.uk
It's relevant and non-hypocritical. It may not be the best comment, but neither was yours.
It's not a problem, it's trivially easy to change what RPC an app / wallet uses. It's literally just changing a URL since the interface is all standardized. There are a lot of other much more important risks to solve that aren't mentioned in this article.
The implication core devs don't understand the centralization risk of RPC services is absurd, as is much of this article.
Or you can set up your own, as doing so is permissionless. You don't even need a GPU or Ether. Just a regular computer, broadband and 2 TiB SSD.
The article is filled with misinformation like the statement above.
More on Ethereum light clients from Chainsafe, the builders of Lodestar, a Typescript implementation of an Ethereum consensus client: https://blog.chainsafe.io/the-road-ahead-for-ethereum-light-...
TL;DR: "Light clients enable more people to participate as first-class citizens, verifying on-chain data without relying on single and centralized JSON RPC endpoints."
The typical user could use something other than Infura - but they don't.
The typical user could use some future system that doesn't exist yet - but they don't.
The typical user could cash out somewhere other than Coinbase - but they don't.
The typical user could use stablecoins other than USDC - but they don't.
This is covered in the article already. Default behaviour matters, a lot. Almost no Ethereum users are going to telnet 30303.
Same argument can be made for key management. A typical user could use non custodial wallet, but they don’t. But that option exists, for when they become unsatisfied with their centralized wallet custodian, or when they want to change custodians, or when they want to use a multi sig that allows for a mix of custodial and non custodial.
Importantly: the option exists. The option to use non custodial EOA and smart contract wallet, DAI or RAI, Alchemy or a custom node RPC, Kraken or another CEX or DEX, the option is present and is chosen by plenty of users.
Which this was subsequently tested in 2016 when...
> The Ethereum Foundation and a majority of mining power decided to violate the immutability of the blockchain and wind back The DAO — because immutability lasts precisely and only until the big boys lose enough money.
So not only immutability was a complete lie in 2016 with the nonsense of 'Code is law' now with the Merge happening to proof-of-stake, unsurprisingly, centralization and big money ultimately wins.
So expect forks of the Ethereum PoW post DAO to just 'fail' like Ethereum Classic has done over the DAO fork.
Further along Gerard's article about Ethereum becoming a security, I think it looks more clearer that it is going to be the case as soon as 'Staking as a service' proliferates towards many retail investors.
As regulations are being much clearer, coins like Ethereum are going to be treading on a very thin line with the SEC and other regulators and if they are not careful it will land them in trouble like what is happening with Ripple with their XRP coin.
This topic is like the "but Hillary's emails" of Ethereum.
Something like 60%+ of Ethereum users at the time lost money in the DAO hack, so yea they created a social fork. It wasn't because of "big money" or centralization, pretty much everyone wanted to fork. That's how forks work, and as you mentioned, ETC is still around if you want to follow that fork.
Nope. It is certainly the DAO investors that lost money who wanted the fork more than anyone else; hence, the ones with big money involved that boosted and influenced that decision to do an urgent hard fork and I don't think the folks promoting the 'decentralization', 'immutability', 'Code is Law' agreed with that, so about this 'pretty much everyone' fallacy; Let's go back into 2016, when it happened. We even have folks who believe that the hack is 'working as intended' [0].
> "Ethereum worked exactly as intended. I don’t believe software should be updated when it works exactly as intended. You assume the risks of your investment. If you don’t understand your investment, you assume unknown risk. Anything else is a bailout by a central authority, i.e. the antithesis of the crypto world..."
There are many other projects that lose money over smart contract hacks every day and there is no mutability or reversibility for those investors. This is the point that the author in this post is making against the 'Code is law' nonsense.
Apparently, it applies to retail who won't get the reversibility treatment but it doesn't apply to lots of large investors losing their money in a failed experiment, boosted by the Ethereum Foundation.
Once that goes south, the fork that is boosted by big money and the Ethereum foundation always wins.
> That's how forks work, and as you mentioned, ETC is still around if you want to follow that fork.
I follow neither ETH or ETC. I am only waiting for more regulatory clarity looming onto the cryptocurrency industry. But I thank you for confirming the centralization of Ethereum and how catastrophic errors and persistent issues in Ethereum are "working as intended".
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/learn/2016/06/25/understanding-the-...
I will never understand crypto diehards who make these statements. I would love to meet one in real life, who has never written any buggy code or made a mistake before - pretty sure it never resulted in the loss of their life savings!
"finance as code" thinking, given access to the traditional financial scams, should be able to re-implement horrors undreamt of in the markets since the last dozen times they were tried and outlawed. But this time they'll have websites and new slang to describe their operation.
When one of the popular nodes as a service goes down, many dApps and users will need to change their endpoint to another. I think the author might be overstating the concern of this centralization.
The solution to RPC centralization is well known: light clients. It is on the developers roadmap but obviously they are prioritizing proof of stake and scalability.
In 2022, you can't presume a damn thing.
As I noted in another comment, users could do all manner of things they don't do. In practice, defaults are overwhelmingly important.
When Infura blocked all of Venezuela in March, due to an error in over-applying sanctions against Russia, some wondered if the Ethereum network was being blocked. No, it was just the app everyone depended on for almost everything.
In the fabulous future, I'm sure it'll be great. In present-day reality, things are as I described them.
Nobody actually cares much about Infura or other points of centralisation because approximately 100% of Ethereum participants in 2022 have a firm and unshakable ideological commitment to being in it for the money, on an extremely short-term horizon.
Lack of education can be fixed. You can even help: instead of spreading poor information, try to educate your readers about the difference between a node as a service and liveness of the blockchain.
Most definitely. Did anyone say otherwise? But the fact that other problems exist doesn't change the fact that crypto adds to them.
Meanwhile, I really hope countries print bills in an ethical manner.
Are you sure you really want to compare the cost of printing to mining?
Did it claim to? Is the one problem not necessary to address? Does addressing the one problem somehow interfere with addressing the other problems?
The main valid damning points I see out of all that is the example of a privileged minority rolling back something that was expressly designed and advertised to never be rolled back.
All that stuff about users using centralized convenience services doesn't seem to actually invalidate the fact, or the value of that fact, that they don't have to.
I haven't and wouldn't touch any crypto with a ten foot pole. And even I think this is more than a bit emotional and questionable.
Every web3 tutorial will blindly say to use it. Makes it easy of course!
And then it is entrenched and has power.
Would like to read more articles about their influence as it all sounds quite interesting from a popcorn perspective.
He said that Bitcoin is centralized because there may be 51% of miners controlled by one entity. However that has been proven to be false (see The Blocksize War). Bitcoin is controlled by the nodes, not by who has the most mining power
Bitcoin is controlled by the exchanges. Whoever has the majority of the trading volume has most of the power and influence over it's price. Currently, this would be Binance.
Please don't bother explaining how P2P is beyond their influence (it's not). Their influence is magnified by Tether which they can mint at will and is involved in over half of all crypto trades.
Long story short --- the crypto market has been rigged --- by Binance. Collusion with others is likely simply due to the fact there is nothing to prevent it --- but it's impossible to say anything for sure because there is no external access.
Blockchain is just an accounting system which tracks how badly the market is rigged.
It is controlled by the miners, and a 51% attack is a serious concern. It always has been, and it always will be.
It was designed assuming at least half of the network would not be malicious.
The blocksize war absolutely didn't prove the superiority of the nodes. These are tall tales told by people who really wanted that to be true.
That's why in the ETH merge, the issue is who the money goes with. Circle and Coinbase are going with the merge, so it wins.
Regardless of small or big loan, it will be slashed. On PoW chain you would still have the mining hardware to run the attack again.
having hardware is not the thing that allows you to attack a PoW network. especially if it's one of the ones that anyone actually puts any stock in the network security of.
bitcoin's network security is a joke (although certainly better than PoS), so hopefully we're on the same page about that as well?