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Comment by asdev | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out how this is decentralized? "A diverse group of entities" will run validator nodes. This sounds like it's just a Solana clone then.

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It's just an attempt at obfuscating the governance for non-technical regulators to think it's beyond the control of stripe. It's the game that all these L1s are doing, participating in the minimum amount of decentralized theater in order to evade regulations.

it depends, regulators can still force validators to censor. I have kept up with the scene in a minute, but i remember builders and even some wallets were dropping tx from tornado cash because of some compliance issues, dont think the trump admin would care

You can have 99% of validators on Ethereum censor your transaction, and you'll still be eventually included. With 12 second block times, your transaction would be included in roughly 20 minutes.

What is the thinking behind that? Can't the majority of validators can't just orphan blocks with your transaction?

I don't think Ethereum allows validators to orphan blocks.

how so?

Yep. Also, censorship by validators will be impossible if FOCIL is included in 2 hard forks from now.

Given my past experiences trying to get EU-compliant invoices for Stripe transactions this is unfortunately also how I feel about the situation. This decentralization has immediate benefits for plausible deniability.

"decentralization"

very well put. its been the game the whole time.

exactly. This is the main value of the "web3" era of blockchains. There's absolutely no decentralization in the way they are governed. It's just enough decentralization so that it can be argued that the users are interacting with a piece of software that the developers wrote, rather than the developers themselves, so that way there's no legal relationship between the two.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing...especially outside of the US/europe banking I get the impression that banking regulations are arbitrary and political and if all we get from crypto is escape from those regulations it may be worth the extra fraud and so on.

it says its an evm clone, so it may not be like solana. Im shocked they didnt go the l2 route like many seem to do. They might pull a bsc with a limited number of validators and just make the stake requirements stupidly high and wink wink the company or entities close to said company, have acquired the majority of said tokens to become a validator and you would need to pay a gazzilion dollars to enter the pool

aka not decentralized at all

Like many L1s that have become Ethereum L2, so will this in time.

It is Reth based. Solana is a completely different implementation.

That is a private Ethereum instance, right?

RETH* is one of the open source implementations of the Ethereum protocol. Around 2% of Ethereum nodes run it today.

Historically, there have been hundreds of blockchians that were basically slightly modified forks of Ethereum clients, operated by a small group of validators that sacrifice decetralization in order to achieve higher throughput. This seems to be a slightly higher effort verson of that.

*https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth

Solana has a higher Nakamoto coefficient (20) than ethereum (6). This means the lowest number of validators that would have to collude to censor the network is 20.

There are some legitimate advantages of ethereum (multiple independent validator software implementations) but decentralisation of the L1 isn’t one of them, even more so when you consider most ethereum transactions happen over centralized L2s.

Validators imply that somebody needs to look at the ledger to make sure there are no split views and the log is consistent. Similar to the way cert transparency ledgers are monitored.

I did not see the mention of decentralised BTW, why would it matter here? You trust business entity at the end of the day.

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