[HN Gopher] Ethereum Services Are Centralized
___________________________________________________________________
Ethereum Services Are Centralized
Author : iamnotarobotman
Score : 132 points
Date : 2021-10-12 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (michaelgummelt.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (michaelgummelt.medium.com)
| modeless wrote:
| > If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes
| will mindlessly run it.
|
| This is only true if the contract specifically allows that,
| right? And that's disclosed in the contract itself. So if you
| don't want that, don't use that contract.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| The post is mostly nonsense, but that said, I'm always astounded
| by how few nodes there are out there. Checking now and there's
| just 2,713 of them - though this number is low because of a bug
| in the latest software which removed thousands in September for
| some reason. It's never been higher than 7,000 or so.
|
| How long would it take you to write a script which DDOS all of
| them? How many are run by organizations which can protect against
| attacks? My guess is not enough. Considering the amount of money
| relying on those measly ~3k servers out there? It's truly
| frightening.
| dwmbt wrote:
| after reading the article and some comments, i thought i would
| comment my own grievance with the article. i think there is a
| disconnect between the quantifiable trust a blockchain offers and
| the authors interpretation. specifically, he mentions that "the
| code these nodes are running is available for anyone to inspect
| (trust)" and that "smart contracts can be trusted to a large
| extent because they operate in the open, are kept in check by the
| ecosystem, and even often have voting protocols in place to
| govern changes."
|
| yeah, that's actually a good enough explanation of what's going
| on there. yet, this doesn't seem to be enough for the author. i
| guess my biggest annoyance is that they seem to think a smart
| contract is just a series of if/else conditionals that can be
| ported onto an AWS instance.
| carlosdp wrote:
| Echoing the other comments, this is a pretty naive understanding
| of how a general purpose smart contract blockchain works and the
| incentive models involved that keep the kind of censorship
| described here from happening. They also don't seem to fully
| grasp how smart contracts that are in-fact decentralized work,
| and are cherry-picking the ones that have an authoritarian
| controller because of the nascency of the technology.
|
| The article isn't really detailed at all, so it's hard to know
| where to start with why these "services" aren't in fact
| "centralized."
|
| It's effectively the equivalent of someone saying "you can't keep
| your password secure from hackers if you store it in a database,
| if someone hacks it then they can steal it and use every site you
| used that password on": it's just obviously false to people who
| know how this works, but now I have to explain how hashing works
| and such.
|
| I'd just encourage reading up on how Ethereum transaction mining
| works before just taking the article's claims at face value.
| Gwarzo wrote:
| I do not have any comment to make on the validity of the
| article, but this comment made me think of exactly why I
| dislike todays censorship friendly media so much.
|
| I can read the article, gather my initial thoughts and come to
| some sensible comments within that articles posting to further
| navigate.
|
| If this article is garbage, the way to dispense with it is with
| comments such as these. (I'm not making any claim to the
| validity or lack-thereof of the article)
| 34g34g34g wrote:
| Then traditional systems better start attempting to
| compete.While Western Union charges fees to cover network
| operating costs for remittances, companies like Strike are
| leveraging Bitcoin to bring those fees to zero.
| reginold wrote:
| What specifically are folks here reading up on regarding
| Ethereum?
|
| I'm looking for interesting takes, generally growing exhausted
| from the various eth subreddits, cryptocurrency and bitcoin
| that are commentary on pricing. Sites like cointelgraph are
| also just barren of anything interesting. It seems like such an
| exciting time for cryptocurrency but not seeing the level of
| rigorous thinking I want.
|
| Yeah this article is complete trash. No comment.
| Tenobrus wrote:
| The /r/ethfinance daily is much more focused on interesting
| technical and social developments and has a higher level of
| discourse than any other crypto sub I'm aware of. Still some
| price talk/memes, but there's some consistently thoughtful
| and well informed posters there, and I'd recommend checking
| it out.
| fossuser wrote:
| Vitalik's blog posts are probably best. [0]
|
| There are also some decent selections here:
| https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/
|
| [0]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html
| tcgv wrote:
| I wrote a piece on the topic earlier this year in my blog [1]
| since I was also interested in learning more on the topic of
| Ethereum and DeFi, and not interested at all in the
| speculative take that attracts most people.
|
| In my post I write about an open source project I implemented
| using smart contracts that acts as an options (derivatives)
| exchange, and all the components required for making it work
| (ex: stablecoins, price oracles, collateral management,
| liquidity pools, etc).
|
| [1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/02/building-a-
| decentralized-o...
| dogman144 wrote:
| https://blockthreat.substack.com/ great security-oriented
| technical read
| fleddr wrote:
| Old but good: https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-
| resources/
|
| https://decrypt.co/ is also pretty decent.
| aboodman wrote:
| Your comment doesn't address the point of the article. The
| author isn't talking about Ethereum itself, which they
| acknowledge up front can comfortably be considered
| decentralized.
|
| The point is smart contracts. They are code, and they have to
| get updated if there are bugs. How do they get updated? Well,
| in the simple (and common) case somebody holds the private key
| and updates it. That's centralization, obviously.
|
| You can get arbitrarily complex with how smart contracts are
| updated. You can have multisig, where 2:3 have to vote to
| update, or you can have actual voting, or you can even do
| voting by stakeholder in the contract.
|
| But whatever you choose, it's fully a function of the smart
| contract itself what level of decentralization it achieves, and
| not at all about Ethereum.
| saurik wrote:
| > Well, in the simple (and common) case somebody holds the
| private key and updates it.
|
| I will grant you "simple", and maybe even "common"... but
| only because most people don't really understand
| decentralization and many of the ones who do don't care about
| it.
|
| The "actual" way this happens, for the protocols and
| contracts that "actually matter" (certainly almost everything
| you would have heard of, as opposed to the long tail of tiny
| pet projects) is that, in the case that a bug is found, all
| of the users have to vote with their feet to move to and
| accept a new one.
|
| Essentially, this is equivalent to saying "decentralized
| contracts simply aren't upgradable", but of course everything
| is upgradable if you accept the idea of people giving up on
| old software and using new software ;P.
|
| (If this sounds familiar, it should be: this is in a very
| real sense similar to how Wireguard intends to deal with
| cryptographic breaks in its chosen cipher suite, as they
| aren't some centralized power able to upgrade everyone's
| computers remotely.)
|
| (FWIW, there is something else you can do, but as it would be
| implemented by still more contracts that themselves might
| have bugs I don't consider it the answer here as it begs the
| question: you make a contract--hopefully a simpler one that
| is less likely to have a bug--that lets people vote on which
| contract is the current accepted one, assuming they can all
| have compatible APIs.)
| mgummelt wrote:
| Isn't Axie centrally upgradeable?
| https://github.com/axieinfinity/public-smart-
| contracts/blob/...
| saurik wrote:
| Axie as a product isn't even remotely decentralized, as
| far as I can understand (though I haven't tried to really
| pull it apart or anything, though I did spend way too
| long researching it a couple months ago): the majority of
| its product is a centralized gaming server that uses
| classic cheat-protection and rate limiting strategies,
| along with a game client that they require you to be
| using--they even ban bots! think: how can a decentralized
| game ban bots?!--which is important as it is effectively
| centrally minting its SLP token (by way of how that token
| comes from points you earn in the game from game play;
| this "should"--if it were actually decentralized--result
| in everyone using bots to play each other constantly for
| maximum SLP earning, instead of hiring people in the
| Philippines to play your characters for you). One would
| do better to ask "in what ways is Axie Infinity even a
| blockchain project?", as I feel like the answers are
| mostly going to suck.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| > I will grant you "simple", and maybe even "common"... but
| only because most people don't really understand
| decentralization and many of the ones who do don't care
| about it.
|
| So assuming that this is mainly an issue of people not
| understanding versus understanding and not caring (though
| you said there's some of that) how is the Ethereum
| community going to get the word out so that this becomes a
| mainstream success versus mainly for speculation as it is
| now?
|
| A common issue and one that I personally feel crypto in
| general suffers from is that neat tech isnt a a criteria on
| which most people flock to use something so what are the
| reasons end users need to know to be like ah yup I will
| drop my regular finance interactions for this or heavily
| augment them with this?
| saurik wrote:
| I question your premise. If you analyze "by weight
| instead of by volume" then I maintain that all of the
| important projects you hear about--think of the
| decentralized exchanges or lending platforms, such as
| Uniswap--do not have back doors in their contracts for
| centralized code updates: when Uniswap wants to build a
| new version, they release a totally new system that
| happens to share a name.
|
| That there are a large number of silly projects most
| people haven't heard of, or random tutorials on the web
| for getting started in crypto, that involve building
| contracts with backdoors is no different from any
| technology... most stuff isn't scalable or even slightly
| secure, even if the products from the biggest companies
| and used by the most people tend to be: like think how
| many websites have ubiquitous SQL or HTML injection
| attacks... only "by volume" (looking at the total number
| of such websites, irrespective of how much use they get)
| as "by weight" (looking at the websites you use during
| the course of a day by how much you use them) I bet
| almost none of them do.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Sort of..an individual smart contract is completely
| immutable; the code cannot be updated. You can create a proxy
| smart contract that points to the contracts actually handling
| execution, and update those pointers to point to new, updated
| version of the code which is what I assume you're referring
| to.
|
| Plenty of popular smart contracts do not do this though, and
| are fully immutable. Rather than updates, the developers
| upload a new version. Users can use the new version, or stay
| on the old one forever (the developers cannot delete it).
|
| Regardless of which one, though, this is known ahead of time.
| A user (or, more likely, a community of users) can inspect
| the code and see to what extent the key holders can modify
| functionality.
| Darvon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#The_DAO_bail
| o...
|
| Eth is immutable unless the central players lose too much
| money then they can roll it back
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I think the DAO hack is misrepresented in the crypto
| community lore. The network simply decided to follow the
| main developers and those that did not, kept with what is
| now ETH classic. A hard fork can happen in absolutely
| _all_ cryptocurrencies, and I see it as a feature rather
| than a bug.
| thebean11 wrote:
| They cannot roll it back. Anybody can create a hard fork,
| and nobody is forced to use that version. In fact, the
| version that was not rolled back still exists, and we are
| all free to use it if we wish!
| everfree wrote:
| Ethereum Classic without the rollback still exists, the
| old history didn't go anywhere. You and anyone else are
| free to use it.
| carlosdp wrote:
| > But this fails to hold true for general purpose chains
| acting as a VM, including the front-runner Ethereum. Ethereum
| nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart
| contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have
| no reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they
| have relatively little stake in the success of individual
| contracts or their ecosystems. If an owner of a smart
| contract publishes a new change, nodes will mindlessly run
| it. Ethereum is blockchain AWS.
|
| This part does talk about Ethereum itself. It's just a
| conflation that, I agree, the author probably didn't intend,
| but nonetheless demonstrates the lack of understanding.
| exo762 wrote:
| Some projects avoid upgrading contracts at all. They deploy a
| new version, create a new UI and point this new UI to new
| contracts. Uniswap V2 vs Uniswap V3. This way users are
| actively opting into new set of contracts.
| aboodman wrote:
| This makes sense to me and I think can be considered
| decentralized. How common are completely immutable
| contracts though?
|
| It seems like for any contract that holds significant value
| it would be insane to make it immutable, particularly when
| it's written in a turing complete language like Solidity.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's a tradeoff. There have been cases where an immutable
| contract was hacked, but there have also been cases where
| an admin key was compromised resulting in loss of funds.
| Users also have to consider the possibility that the
| admin is corrupt.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| It's pretty common, the two biggest and most used
| decentralized exchanges uniswap and sushiswap hold $10.5B
| and are immutable.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Uniswap censored tokens representing stocks some months
| back. This is 100% mutable behavior of the project.
| snug wrote:
| That was blocked at the web interface, if you wanted to
| use one of those tokens you could directly interact with
| the smart contract to get around those blocks
| exo762 wrote:
| Holders of large amounts of funds often value simplicity.
| Take old Gnosis Multisig vs new Gnosis Safe. While lots
| of projects migrated (moved funds) to Gnosis Safe, some
| are still using old Multisig contract, which was so
| simple it could be audited by anyone in an hour. Old
| Gnosis Multisig is immutable and can definitely be
| considered a huge success.
| Tenoke wrote:
| All things they consider risks are definitely possible and for
| some of them if regulators or mobs push for them plausible.
| It's not like there aren't e.g. blacklists already.
| mgummelt wrote:
| Author here.
|
| I would have fleshed this out more if I knew this was going to
| reach the front page. Yes, many smart contracts are deployed
| with distributed upgrade mechanisms, and I mention them briefly
| at the end of the post. I mostly wrote this to start a
| conversation with friends about a) how many internet services
| can be practically operated with the friction that such upgrade
| mechanisms create, and b) the potential to use the blockchain
| only for the voting protocol, then to sign and deploy the
| service on a traditional cloud.
| seibelj wrote:
| Decentralization is a spectrum. A truly decentralized network,
| one pure from every angle of analysis, does not exist.
|
| Ethereum itself is more decentralized than all traditional value-
| transfer networks of the old centralized financial world, and the
| applications built on top of Ethereum are also a spectrum of
| decentralization.
| spicybright wrote:
| Obviously there's no such thing as 100% pure decentralization.
| I don't even know what that would look like.
|
| So it's not really worth the time trying to classify systems
| based on some theoretical purity rating. It doesn't gain us
| anything.
| lottin wrote:
| How do you measure decentralisation?
| fleddr wrote:
| Using decentralized analytics.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| Ethereum can be replaced by MongoDB.
| xrd wrote:
| This is pure garbage:
|
| "Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart
| contracts they execute, but in practice, node operators have no
| reason to inspect or reject these upgrades, because they have
| relatively little stake in the success of individual contracts or
| their ecosystems."
| spicybright wrote:
| This will likely be controversial, but tech like bitcoin is a big
| step backwards from payment systems we currently have.
|
| All the rules and regulations were created because someone was
| bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent something
| from happening again.
|
| Block chain money loses all of those protections to stop a bad
| actor from, say, a hacker draining your wallet with no recourse.
|
| So we find ourselves back to step one. I do think it's inevitable
| layers of regulations and rules will crop up, either from
| governments, or power holders requiring layers of smart contracts
| to respect transactions.
|
| It will just be a matter of time till the modern banking systems
| "port" themselves onto the chain.
| dogman144 wrote:
| > All the rules and regulations were created because someone
| was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent
| something from happening again.
|
| It's a bit more nuanced than that. Current KYC/AML regs that
| you're referring to in banking, and are being applied to
| crypto, actually come from the Patriot Act, Title III.
|
| Why this is relevant: KYC/AML have stuck around as a perceived
| common-sense thing to do, and your comment is good example
| though. However, that evaluation deserves some inspection with
| the knowledge that it comes out of the Patriot Act. The Patriot
| Act is known for some historically challenging overreach and
| various parts of it have been overruled, repealed, deemed
| unconstitutional, and generally disliked by all aspects of the
| political spectrum. That's not to say that a few good things
| came out of it - perhaps KYC/AML is an example. But, I think
| specifically because of the Patriot Act ties, it's a bit of a
| misnomer to call KYC/AML as a sort of bland, unambiguously good
| thing that's just always been around. The Patriot Act is very
| much "not that," was passed in a fairly turbulent time in US
| history, and has not aged well. As current KYC/AML came out of
| that time period and law, perhaps it should be shaded by that.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| I somewhat agree, and I think it's largely already happening.
| For the most part I think it's unlikely anybody who's not
| somewhat tech savvy would ever move their coins off of a
| service/exchange like CoinBase, and such an exchange already
| provides some of those guarantees and could easily provide
| more. All the benefits and drawbacks of bitcoin pretty much go
| away if you never actually use any "physical" bitcoins and just
| go through an exchange. That said I have my doubts about it
| ever actually getting all that big for everyday use, everybody
| is always going to need dollars so I don't think there's all
| that much of a reason for big banks and payment systems to
| "switch".
| k__ wrote:
| I think, the excact opposite could be the case.
|
| An transparent open source platform with a globally
| decentralized payment mechanism at protocol level could be the
| one reason blockchains could win, despite everything else of
| them being "just worse AWS".
| fleddr wrote:
| Contrary to the mainstream narrative on Bitcoin, it's not
| purposefully designed to bypass regulation, depending on which
| type of regulation we're talking about.
|
| Bitcoin's power lies in its controlled supply that is absolute
| and guaranteed. As such, you can argue that Bitcoin is
| regulated in its monetary policy (by verifiable software),
| whilst the traditional system isn't. The entire reason Bitcoin
| now has a trillion dollar market cap is the unstable
| traditional system where savings have a negative return.
|
| This is the step _forward_ , not backwards. At least to those
| believing in Bitcoin. You gain protection against central
| debasement and you gain a brand new ability: Bitcoin is
| unconfiscatable.
|
| You're right that crypto custody is harder than a traditional
| bank account, although it doesn't have to be. People can chose
| between die-hard self custody (cold wallet), hot wallets, and
| soon there will be more fool-proof mainstream options, I
| believe Twitter is working on one.
| lottin wrote:
| The supply of bitcoins can be inflated in the same way that
| the supply of dollars is inflated, namely by fractional
| reserve banking. In fact the amount of dollars created by the
| federal reserve is a small proportion of the total dollars in
| circulation. The other thing is that the quantity of money,
| which is one of the key variables influencing the price
| level, does not remain constant even if the supply of money
| does, because of trade imbalances. For example, any trade
| deficit is necessarily offset by an outflow of money, thus
| reducing the quantity of money in the economy. Therefore if
| you think that the adoption of bitcoin as currency would
| prevent your cash balances from losing value in any way,
| shape or form you're completely wrong.
| fleddr wrote:
| There is no such thing as fractional reserve banking in
| Bitcoin.
|
| Say you have a wallet with a balance of 10 BTC and decide
| to act as if you're a bank. The first lender comes,
| requesting a loan of 30 BTC.
|
| You don't have 30 BTC, and it basically already stops
| there. You can't transfer the 20 extra BTC to the lender,
| since that BTC does not exist. You can't make up your own
| BTC as it's all on-chain.
|
| You can make up however much fiat money you want. You can
| own 10 BTC and loan out the USD equivalent of 30 BTC in
| USD, but that's traditional fractional reserve banking,
| which has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
| yokem55 wrote:
| > Bitcoin's power lies in its controlled supply that is
| absolute and guaranteed.
|
| Bitcoin's supply limit is only as guaranteed as the community
| consensus around what the supply limit should be. Now that
| consensus is unlikely to change, but there is no magic or law
| of physics that makes it so.
|
| It's just (a strong) community consensus.
| fleddr wrote:
| Technically, you're right, but the word "just" strongly
| undersells the strength of this consensus compared to fiat
| currencies, which has none at all.
| beambot wrote:
| I'm always reminded of articles like this:
|
| > Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can't Account For
| $21 Trillion
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-...
|
| > Fed Committed $7.77 Trillion To Rescue Banks [in 2008,
| previously undisclosed]
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2011/11/28/142854391....
|
| You can argue whether this is a bug versus benefit... but
| transparency seems like a general win.
| serverholic wrote:
| I forget the source but I once heard a quote that really
| resonated with me "corruption festers in the dark but tends
| to evaporate once it's brought to light". With that said,
| imagine a government where you can audit every transaction
| they make...
| fidesomnes wrote:
| > All the rules and regulations were created because someone
| was bad enough for people to agree on a rule to prevent
| something from happening again.
|
| No, not how things happened at all.
|
| > bitcoin is a big step backwards from payment systems we
| currently have.
|
| Please share with the class the open PKI digital ledger that
| anyone can use with no permission "we" currently have.
| anonporridge wrote:
| It's a mistake to think that the exciting thing about bitcoin
| is as a new kind of payment system for consumers.
|
| Instead, it's a rock solid foundation for a new global
| financial/monetary system in which every nation state,
| organization, and individual can participate without the
| permission of any privileged group.
|
| It's a neutral, digital money, like gold was a neutral,
| physical money.
|
| I fully expect that if it becomes a new money standard, we will
| in fact see higher layer payment networks (like Visa, Paypal,
| etc) that provide consumer protection services (for a fat fee)
| on top of the bitcoin network. Those people who don't want the
| responsibility of self custodying their money in a way that
| can't be recovered if they are robbed, can choose to bank with
| these services.
| lottin wrote:
| I don't see why anyone would want to build an international
| monetary system on top of something like bitcoin which was
| designed and developed by people who clearly know nothing
| about finance or monetary economics, but maybe it's just
| me...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > people who clearly know nothing about finance or monetary
| economics, but maybe it's just me...
|
| I'd argue that that is true of effectively any currency
| system that has ever existed.
|
| Maybe many are now managed by people who "understand"
| monetary economics, but they weren't created by those
| people.
| brighton36 wrote:
| Blockchains are a profitable form of discourse. They don't
| have to do much of anything, and typically,they do nothing
| at all.
|
| The function of blockchain, is mostly to obfuscate desire,
| in the interest of increasing confidence.
| anonporridge wrote:
| "If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the
| time to try to convince you, sorry." - Satoshi
| jstx1 wrote:
| I wouldn't call it neutral. It still has a development team
| made up of people who decide the direction of the technology.
| You don't like a decision and use a fork - now you're
| isolated from everyone else who is still transacting on the
| main chain.
|
| The validation of transactions is a red herring in these
| discussions - the real question of decentralisation is who is
| responsible for making decisions about the future of the tech
| and what happens when people disagree. In that respect
| Bitcoin is neither decentralised nor neutral. Same as
| Ethereum.
| serverholic wrote:
| Right now blockchains are essentially being incubated by
| centralized authorities as they mature.
|
| Eventually, we'll see the ideas behind Decentralized
| Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) mature and become a viable
| alternative to centralized authority.
|
| I think that's the plan at least with Ethereum. However,
| Ethereum 2.0 is still being deployed and what I'm talking
| about is probably more like 4.0 or beyond.
|
| However, right now there is just no mature alternative.
| Someone has to own the keys.
|
| Edit: Also, what others have said regarding being able to
| choose your development team. That's one of the cool things
| about crypto. Blockchains can be forked with enough
| support.
| fleddr wrote:
| "I wouldn't call it neutral. It still has a development
| team made up of people who decide the direction of the
| technology."
|
| The development team has no such power. They can raise a
| BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal), which goes through
| rigorous cycles of analysis. A huge amount of paranoid eyes
| will obsess over any change proposed.
|
| As for the development team itself, there's no THE
| development team. Rather, it's a highly diverse set of
| crypto businesses, non-profits, and individual volunteers.
| This diversity too helps to preserve common interests,
| rather than specific ones.
|
| Should the BIP survive the first round of extreme scrutiny,
| next a whopping 95% of miners need to signal that they
| support the change. But not even that is enough, nodes
| (validators, of which there are an extreme amount) can
| still reject the change. Which is what happened in 2017,
| when miners wanted to increase block size (which reduces
| decentralization) and the community blocked it, despite a
| 95% miner approval.
|
| Surely there's no such thing as 100% decentralization or
| neutrality at a theoretical level, but this is as close as
| it gets.
| ftlio wrote:
| Good luck getting any change into Bitcoin that isn't good
| for every participant of the network. The last time people
| tried this, users, not even those users with the most
| Bitcoin at stake, were able to produce enough chaos and
| generate enough risk that they failed. Ethereum is capable
| of full consensus mechanism changes that hurt subsets of
| the network who don't hold the majority of Eth, the latest
| of which just further entrenched that ability.
|
| I personally prefer the former for that reason, but by your
| critique, Ethereum is practically conducive to keeping the
| people who control the protocol small. Bitcoin is probably
| headed to a version freeze this decade, which is great.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Unlike the development teams at a software company, though,
| the development teams here do not have any special
| privileges over the software. They only have "control" for
| as long as their users continue choosing their forks.
|
| If a second "development team" sprung up and had more user
| support than the existing team, there is literally no
| advantage the current team has to control the software.
| anonporridge wrote:
| The development team doesn't have the power to decide the
| future direction. If they release a highly controversial
| change, no one is obligated to use their code. They could
| continue using an old version, or switch to an alternative
| node implementation led by different developers.
|
| Every change to the network is a complex dance between the
| power of the developers, the miners, the exchanges and
| services, and the actual coin holders. If any significant
| segment of these forces don't agree with the direction,
| then the default is to change nothing and maintain the
| status quo.
|
| This is what makes it neutral. No major changes to the
| network can happen without supermajority support among all
| players, otherwise you risk severely fracturing the
| network, which is bad for everyone.
| kristjansson wrote:
| _Any_ database can be foundational, digital money if you get
| the enough people and their governments to agree that it is.
| The database part is not the hard part.
| anonporridge wrote:
| No, the agreement and trust part is.
|
| Bitcoin is the trust machine. That's the problem it solves.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Bitcoin is trustworthy in the way that gold or beads or
| shells in a vault are trustworthy - if you have it, you
| have it, and if you give it to some else, they have it
| and you don't[1]. That doesn't make it easier to get
| people and world governments to agree to construct value
| (and accept payments and taxes) in terms of Bitcoin, or
| to trust that Bitcoin will continue to be exchangeable
| for a predictable amount of real goods and services in
| the future.
|
| It's a sort of stable system if everyone already measures
| value in terms of bitcoin, since the database itself
| works well enough, and users are incentivized to make
| choices that sustain it as a store of value. That's true
| of _any_ unit of account though, nothing inherent to
| bitcoin makes it more stable in that regard; the energy
| usage, transactions costs, and distinction between miners
| and users probably add risk on that account.
|
| Also (and this is not directed at you personally, but the
| arbitrary bitcoin maximalist) its hard to take one with
| millions of glass beads seriously when they argue the
| world should measure value itself in terms of glass
| beads, which then by pure happenstance will make them
| fabulously wealthy.
|
| [1]: and I do appreciate the social and software
| engineering that allows a purely abstract quantity to
| have those properties.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Bitcoin is trustworthy in the way that gold or beads or
| shells in a vault are trustworthy
|
| Sure, if you abstract away the whole "who owns the vault"
| question...
|
| But that seems facile.
|
| I'm hardly a crypto stan but I'd love to see actually
| cogent critiques.
| kristjansson wrote:
| That was underspecified, apologies. You own the vault.
| Everyone has a vault. The vault is your key.
|
| Would've been clearer to say 'pocket' or something, but
| that doesn't imply the level of physical security I
| attribute to Bitcoin.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| People have different perception of "regulations" as a concept
| (as opposed to myriad different good, bad & ugly
| implementations).
|
| To some, "regulation" is a bad, 4-letter word. It's somebody
| else, some strange entity, infringing upon my freedoms. "Let us
| make our own decisions and use our own judgment and experience,
| and this will work better!".
|
| The naive view of "regulation" as a concept, to which I
| subscribe, is collective memory. Something bad happened, and we
| said "Well let's not do THAT again". Hence regulation against
| pyramid schemes in many countries; sure you can say "let me
| make my own mistakes", but that's basically what happened:
| pyramid schemes were allowed, we made a mistake, and said "well
| that sucks". A lot of financial rules, that may be
| inconvenient, go back to edge cases and bad actors and real-
| life scenarios.
|
| NOW... bureaucracy absolutely has a life of its own, and there
| are a lot of bad regulations, but the way I see it, from a high
| enough perspective, any fresh, naive system (whatever
| technology underlies it) will either:
|
| a) Actually and seriously not have any regulations ever, which
| means we'll all keep repeating same mistakes and have issue
| with same edge cases / bad actors forever; it'll be a wild wild
| west and some people will have high risk appetites and some
| won't.
|
| or
|
| b) will eventually have regulations making it same as old
| system but with different technology.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > a big step backwards from payment systems we currently have.
|
| Just yesterday lawmaking initiative in Russia proposed to give
| police and FSB an ability of pre-judicial freeze of all assets
| belonging to a person, including all personal accounts and all
| accounts of all linked businesses.
|
| Good luck living in our increasingly cashless society where
| corrupt police officers can suffocate you with a single press
| of a button.
| fleddr wrote:
| Indeed. From our first world perspective, we don't understand
| the humanitarian life raft that crypto can be.
|
| Lebanon is currently facing extremely high inflation whilst
| at the same time, governments close banks. Imagine that, your
| life savings being decimated whilst you're locked out of
| accessing it.
|
| With a proper setup, crypto could be a solution. Access to it
| can't be realistically blocked and it is unconfiscatable.
| Furthermore, it can be used by those that are unbanked, all
| it takes is a smartphone.
|
| Another story is from a guy whom recently fled from Venezuela
| to Colombia, and blogged about his experience. On his
| journey, he was shaken down by police officers, local tribes,
| traffickers, basically everybody.
|
| Here too crypto could have played a humanitarian role.
| ojr wrote:
| Ethereum enthusiast are quick to disagree, the author of the
| article might not have a deep understanding of how everything
| works but headline of the article holds somewhat true.
|
| Metamask is a centralized service with centralized team, if
| Google removed this extension from Chrome as they temporarily did
| before, it would make adoption for new users harder.
|
| Open Sea has centralized operators, the orderbook is not on the
| blockchain I believe.
|
| Uniswap the "decentralized exchange" has acentralized team with
| vc funding and registration with the SEC.
|
| Infura is another centralized service, that so many Ethereum
| projects depend on.
|
| It is hard to call these services decentralized. Although the
| small mainstream success of these services and markets, show that
| fully decentralization is probably not needed for most mainstream
| users.
| politician wrote:
| Is Medium playing games with browser history? When clicking the
| back button after clicking "read more" it kept refreshing the
| same page. I hate when sites do that.
| xchaotic wrote:
| Medium has a lot of dark patterns by now - like seriously they
| expect me to pay perpetually to read somebody's random rants?
| Needing to login or register just read something etc I've moved
| my blog off Medium a long time ago to ensure the content stays
| in the open for free
| sva_ wrote:
| This lightweight 'wrapper' around Medium was on HN today:
|
| https://scribe.rip/crypto-services-are-neither-decentralized...
| samaman wrote:
| To respond to the title: yes, yes they are, if you consider how
| many live in infura or an AWS geth instance and/or quorum by JPM.
| Doesn't mean its not a better means for data security...just that
| yes, the publisher of said smart contract can just replace or
| change to contract if they really wanted to if it were not part
| of the mainnet. There are many infura nodes though that are part
| of the mainnet, so that's unlikely unless some company just
| forced all users to their own ETH network.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| This lacks an understanding of how Ethereum contracts can
| function. He's assuming that a single person or entity must own a
| contract, and that's not true.
|
| That's the whole point of DeFi. Uniswap is a great example, which
| is a fully decentralized exchange.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| > Ethereum nodes can in theory filter modifications to the smart
| contracts they execute.
|
| This is the crux of the point, and as far as I'm aware is
| incorrect. A transaction to change a smart contract must be
| signed, a node cannot modify a transaction. A miner can in theory
| refuse a transaction to change a contract, but the only way to
| reliably prevent a change is a 51% attack. A node could refuse to
| accept a change, but it would fork the network and the node would
| be running a non canonical chain, which makes it pointless.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Meta: Unsure what is happening on the front page today. This
| isn't even a link to the article[1], and somehow it rocketed to
| #10 in under an hour. A nearly 2-year-old announcement about
| SHA-1, posted 20 minutes ago, is in 3rd place.
|
| 1: https://michaelgummelt.medium.com/crypto-services-are-
| neithe...
| anonporridge wrote:
| Maybe it's just because bitcoin has been on a tear toward new
| all time highs this past week, so crypto is on everyone's
| minds.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I've felt for a while that there are some
| pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN systems. There's
| always a lot of strong downvotes or upvotes for specific
| subjects, but not that many voices in comments to go with them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > there are some pretty strong vote rings avoiding the HN
| systems.
|
| Something I've noticed spending time online is that people
| tend to really over-estimate when this is actually happening.
|
| These accusations seem to have accelerated a lot since the
| 2016 election and related claims around astroturfing.
|
| Regardless, your comment is against HN rules.
| burnished wrote:
| You could also just be doing real-time sentiment analysis of
| the readers of hackernews right? I wonder how you'd prove or
| disprove this. I know I get a similar feeling lately about
| Reddit, that some topics seem to be machine generated due to
| pretty surprising typos (not the existence of them, but the
| kinds, and not the kinds you get used to from ESL students).
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Agreed; though I always assumed it was the touch of the HN
| editorial voice.
| dang wrote:
| These perceptions can be very unreliable so it would be good
| to ask us to look at specific links. If voting rings are
| getting around HN's anti-abuse systems, that would be a huge
| problem and would instantly become our top priority.
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL to that from
| https://michaelgummelt.medium.com/ now. Thanks!
|
| As for what's happening on HN - it seems to be just the usual
| stochastic churn. Who knows why people post old things? if
| they're interesting they're welcome, and a lot of people
| decided that one was interesting.
| robcohen wrote:
| As other commenters have said, this article largely appears naive
| on how contracts work. Looking past that, the main thrust of the
| argument is that if "the market" wants things like chargebacks
| and censorship, then there will exist large blockchain "startups"
| that fulfill that need. They also make the argument that such a
| progression is likely inevitable.
|
| What they fail to understand is that is not important. What is
| important is that blockchain enables people to vote through their
| choices. If they prefer decentralization, they can have that. If
| they prefer centralized features, they can have that. Until
| blockchain, it wasn't even possible to have the choice of
| decentralization because it simply technologically didn't exist.
| Crypto-hopefulls believe this choice will better society. Maybe
| it will, maybe it won't. But even a subset of society can benefit
| from having more choices. Just because your candidate loses
| doesn't invalidate the benefits of having a democracy.
| dabedee wrote:
| Not to remove from some of the valid concerns made in the
| article, but I find it ironic that a post decrying centralization
| of Ethereum services is written on Medium.
| [deleted]
| trident5000 wrote:
| Price is going up. Looks like its time for the daily anti-crypto
| articles on HN now.
| togilvie wrote:
| This is a really bad take, with a limited understanding of how
| Ethereum nodes and smart contracts operate. I clicked hoping for
| more...
| cryptica wrote:
| The basic premise is true. Ethereum nodes do not provide even
| basic search/querying features out of the box so you have to rely
| on centralized services to index the blockchain data for
| querying. So if you want to build anything useful which
| integrates with Ethereum in any way, you need to trust a
| centralized service provider to accurately report the data... I
| was shocked when I tried to integrate with Ethereum for the first
| time. It almost seems as though they have made it difficult to
| integrate with on purpose.
|
| It's been over a decade. Couldn't they have written some kind of
| open source service which exposes the Ethereum node's data via a
| simple REST HTTP API? This would not be a difficult project to
| implement.
| eco wrote:
| What data were you looking for? geth provides a JSON RPC
| interface. Ethereum is general purpose so you'll need to know
| how a particular contract works to get information out of it
| but some contracts adhere to standards like ERC-20.
|
| Ethereum launched six years ago, by the way (not a decade).
| cryptica wrote:
| Does geth provide a basic search/querying feature? For
| example like searching for a list of transactions sent to and
| from a specific account.
|
| But doesn't geth require me to setup and sync my own Ethereum
| node from scratch? I heard it consumes 300GB minimum. It
| would be great if I could just query some random node on
| testnet for example for testing my service before I commit to
| launching a node.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| Was expecting to find a mention of Metamask and Infura. They both
| run on AWS and are the infrastructure bridges powering the
| majority of dApps. Oh and 50% of both are owned by Joe Lubin.
|
| So without mentioning mining/staking pool centralization, you've
| got centralization of both infrastructure and ownership.
| vmception wrote:
| There are plenty of smart contracts where the admin destroyed
| their access, and where the admin never had any privileged
| access.
|
| Are people so out of touch on this topic that they would ask
| "source?" after being presented with negative information that
| matched what they wanted to read
| woah wrote:
| This blog post is pure nonsense. Nobody can alter an Ethereum
| smart contract unless they control all full nodes, or can
| convince all full node operators to install a fork of the
| software that reaches into the database and modifies that
| contract.
|
| It is possible for smart contracts to contain code that allows
| them to update themselves when receiving a message signed by a
| certain key, but if this is the case, then it is obvious to
| anyone inspecting the contract.
|
| Most heavily used Ethereum contracts such as Uniswap and Compound
| for example do not contain any updating code because users do not
| trust it.
| [deleted]
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Compound had a huge bug which lead to the CEO (lol
| decentralized) to threaten users that got the airdropped tokens
| he will report them to the IRS. This is decadence at the
| highest level of this "new era".
| everfree wrote:
| Robert Leshner backpedaled on that statement later that same
| day, telling everyone that what he said was "bone-headed".
|
| > I'm trying to do anything I can to help the community get
| some of its COMP back, and this was a bone-headed tweet /
| approach. That's on me.
|
| > Luckily, the community is much bigger, and smarter, than
| just me.
|
| > I appreciate your ridicule and support.
|
| > -- Robert Leshner (@rleshner) October 1, 2021
| bob229 wrote:
| Crypto/blockchain is garbage without a use case. Stop wasting our
| time
| factorialboy wrote:
| The moment a small group of people bailed out their friends' DAO,
| Ethereum lost all credibility. I am referring to:
| https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...
|
| Since then Eth has proved to be a successful investment, so this
| is not a commentary on the performance of this digital asset. But
| rather a comment on the false immutable, decentralized claims of
| this blockchain.
| bsamuels wrote:
| Social consensus should _always_ override rule of law. Society
| is not formed around people's relationship with the law, it's
| based on people's relationship with each other. The hard fork
| required social consensus to trump rule of law, and they got
| it.
|
| "but what about eth classic?"
|
| The ETC chain exists, yes, however it is not "Ethereum".
| There's a timeline where the majority was against the fork, and
| ETC would have remained "Ethereum", with the forked chain
| taking on a new name like Ethereum Cash or something.
| thebean11 wrote:
| They didn't do so unilaterally. The users of Ethereum
| collectively chose to bail it out.
| mountainboy wrote:
| not all of them. Hence the eth classic fork.
|
| A majority of eth miners and users decided to change the
| rules and ignore the promises of immutability previously made
| to all.
|
| Having a majority does not make an action ethical. Hence the
| term: tyranny of the majority.
|
| This serious breach of faith soured many people on the
| project, and the mis-trust continues to this day.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Right, my statement wasn't super clear but I meant the
| users of present-day Ethereum which is the bailed out
| version.
|
| I don't see how ethics plays into it; it's a judgement call
| and the existence of the forked Ethereum isn't an attack on
| ETC.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Having a majority does not make an action ethical. Hence
| the term: tyranny of the majority.
|
| Pricing is not "tyranny of the majority." If nobody wants
| to buy what you are selling, you are not being oppressed.
|
| Given that people decided they would much rather buy the
| coin with the altered ledger, it is more valuable.
|
| As a meta note: Crypto seems to bring out the most low-brow
| critiques on either side. Maybe because it has become
| popular with a mass audience?
| sva_ wrote:
| More or less:
|
| > On 15 July 2016, a short notice on-chain vote was held on
| the DAO hard fork.[8] Of the 82,054,716 ETH in existence,
| only 4,542,416 voted, for a total voter turn out of 5.5% of
| the total supply on 16 July 2016; 3,964,516 ETH (87%) voted
| in favor, 1/4 of which came from a single address, and
| 577,899 ETH (13%) opposed the DAO fork.[8]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#Carbon_vote
| ccamrobertson wrote:
| It's bizarre to me that one would gauge the credibility of
| Ethereum today based on an event that occurred less than a year
| into the existence of the protocol, and despite massive
| performance with respect to digital assets since then
| (algorithmic stablecoins, AMM's, etc.).
|
| It's certainly fair to debate the strength of immutability
| guarantees with respect to a given blockchain, but in practice
| no blockchain is perfectly immutable given that humans still
| write and deploy the clients that run them. Consider the 184
| billion Bitcoin hack from 2010, a similar straw man about the
| _current_ immutability claims of Bitcoin.
| capsulecorp wrote:
| It's bizarre to me that one would NOT gauge the credibility
| of Ethereum today based on what the developers actually did
| vs what they said they would do. What exactly have they done
| to redeem themselves from their previous scandal?
| arisAlexis wrote:
| That action was pivotal and a blunder and Vitalik was not
| mature enough to realize it. I believe he wouldn't do it
| again today.
| Animats wrote:
| How many miners control 51% of the Etherium hash rate? That's the
| key issue.
|
| For Bitcoin, it was at one time 5, all in China, and there's a
| group photo.
| wmf wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10699.pdf
| vmception wrote:
| Odd and inaccurate take. Some or many services have admin
| control. But it doesn't matter.
|
| If you are exchanging time for food and shelter, you need to be
| building smart contracts. That's where we are right now, it is
| the most lucrative use of time possible.
|
| Put down the Shopify widget development book, put down the
| dropshipping tutorial, and start deploying smart contracts.
| nootropicat wrote:
| >If an owner of a smart contract publishes a new change, nodes
| will mindlessly run it.
|
| Utter nonsense, contracts can be both immutable and mutable.
| There's inbuilt owner capability, code has to explicitly
| implement upgrade capability. All nodes do is run code.
|
| Uniswap for example has no upgrade capability.
| Geee wrote:
| True decentralization means that every end user can choose which
| version of the software they want to run and how the software
| runs. This is only possible if they _can_ run the software on
| their own hardware, in the event that they don 't agree with the
| remote service provider.
|
| That's why general purpose blockchains like Ethereum are doomed
| to fail. They can never be both competitive with centralized
| trust-based services and lightweight enough to be run by end
| users.
| DennisP wrote:
| Ethereum researchers have worked very hard to meet both
| requirements, for exactly that reason. You can run the beacon
| chain plus execution node on very modest hardware, and L1
| scaling will be based on sharding to keep it modest.
|
| It's looking like L2 scaling will end up mostly zkrollups,
| which are easy for modest clients to verify. The only
| heavyweight hardware then would be zkrollup block producers,
| who could potentially engage in censorship, but the nice thing
| about zkrollups is that users have a cryptographic guarantee
| that they can exit with their funds without a waiting period.
|
| All this together would take Ethereum well into transaction
| rates comparable to legacy banking.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Find people that are skeptical about the benefits of
| blockchains/cryptocurrencies AND have a strong technical
| understand is so rare. This is not one of them.
|
| So far the best person that has that intersection I have found is
| Angela Walsh.
| newacct583 wrote:
| This wasn't making sense to me, then I got to the meat:
|
| > _The real risk is that blockchain Twitter will begin to censor
| dubiously defined "hate speech", or that blockchain Mastercard
| will add support for chargebacks._
|
| This is just culture warism. In fact moderated discussion
| forums[1] and reversible payments are _DESIRED FEATURES_ of
| products in the real world. Of course that 's going to happen.
| But to the author that constitutes "centralization", but what it
| really means is "not the libertarian utopia I imagined".
|
| [1] We're posting on one!
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