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Comment by RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm | Hacker News Reader

Notice: I get that they advertise this as diversity.

But from the perspective of someone who just wants to use the software it would be a lot easier if I don't have to sieve through 5 commercial websites.

Also: For the $ 1 billion they hold in assets [0] I'd expect them to provide at least one full set of usable software from it, not just specifications on how to write the software - which is what they seem to only be producing now?

They already cancelled their GUI wallet some years ago (https://github.com/ethereum/mist) which was kind of weird already considering that people did have money in it already.

But you could at least resort to using geth as a terminal UI client.

Now it seems ETH holders won't be able to access their funds using fully official software at all, which is kinda "meh", no matter if you're pro-crypto or against.

[0] Calculated with today's Ether price, based on: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...

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The idea of “official” is intentionally being rejected. There is no official version of anything, just community consensus of the spec, from which anyone can implement a client.

In the past the ethereum foundation has made their own wallets/browsers/clients but they’d rather focus energy in other places and instead have grants and donations to others to help them get started and to operate their own companies.

The reason is to break away from being an authority, over time the EF should become less powerful. They are making decisions to reduce their importance and the reliance the ecosystem has on one group. Ethereum users were never ethereum foundation users.

The other listed organisations and their clients are all excellent. This is a much more healthy approach.

Thanks for your reply.

My reply elsewhere in this thread can also serve as a reply to yours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32593116

I guess the foundation is prioritizing the health of the overall ecosystem (diversity) over the convenience of people who just want to get started. Perhaps they see Ethereum as backend infrastructure not as a user-facing system.

Well, yes this might make sense, but it reminds me of a situation where there is full diversity:

Chinese consumer products on Amazon.

Is it enjoyable to buy stuff out of this very large diversity? Rather not, because most of it is garbage :|

It can be nice to have at least one known-to-be-good version of things :)

Layer 2

> was kind of weird already considering that people did have money in it already.

Wallets are signing software with various pretty interfaces. Wallets can sign messages to access things on-chain. Wallets don't store gold coins actually in the wallet.

Someone testing recoverability can take the recovery phrases and put them in a different wallet on a different continent. Both old and new wallets will show the coins and will be able to sign messages.

Oh I was fully aware of that, but nevertheless I do not consider it a wise decision to abandon the wallet development:

I would say the probability is 100% that a non-zero percentage of users will not be able to figure out how to migrate to a different software and thus lose their money.

Also, as said elsewhere, for the billion dollars they got handed they could at least provide the most basic set of software. If you're a cryptocurrency project that would be a wallet.

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