Ultimately I think that's one the big issues with crypto. Even though most altcoins boast decentralization, their development is only controlled by a few people who have commit rights to the git repository. When someone disagrees with them, it usually ends up in forking a new currency. Perhaps someone with more experience in the crypto space can shed some light on this...is there a way to truly decentralize development as well?
It's not truly decentralized. There's a group of core developers that hold the keys to the source code for every cryptocurrency, and ultimately centralize the decision making process. Sure, people can choose not to adopt the code or fork, but then you just end up with less useful versions of the same system with less adoption than the core.
Indeed, and there may be strong financial/legal incentives for doing so. Similarly, many developers may all be employed/funded by one organisation, and multiple clients may share large amounts of code (and be unable to avoid accepting large changes made to the upstream project).
So, while I appreciate the great effort to quantify the level of decentralization in the cryptocurrency space, I think the article mostly just exposes the subjective decisions being made by people who make claims about decentralization. Even that could be a big step forward for debating these technologies, though.
I think the centralisation issue with most cryptocurrencies is quite interesting. Almost all of them have a generally accepted organization that controls their development. This organization can make large-scale changes but controversial ones usually lead to breakaway forks. Theoretically these forks could be more valuable than the one controlled by the organization. In practice if a fork wants to be successful it's going to need its own organization.
I admire the principles of decentralization, but I think it's rather like "serverless" - it moves the functionality around in order to pretend. All the cryptocurrencies have pretty "centralized" dev teams; as with Etherum they can fork to decide what history is and most miners will go with that. History is written by whoever has the github.
No, not all cryptocurrencies are decentralized. There's nothing about a blockchain that requires decentralization. It's a key tenet of some of the coins, but not all.
Well, I mean, bitcoin isn't really decentralised... Not just because most of the circulation is held by a small number of accounts, and not just because most mining is heavily concentrated too. The real centralisation is the development of the client software. As long as that team can keep at least 51% of the network on their software, they can change the rules and control things as much as they want. Past experience has shown that trying to fork it doesn't get much traction, so the network remains basically entirely centrally controlled by the official bitcoin client's dev team...
ETH, and any cryptocurrency for that matter, has never been “decentralized” in terms of development. There are always a few guys making all major decisions, and it’s hard to oppose them other than making a forked currency.
None of the Cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized, at best, they are distributed. They all have devs with access to the repos and devs who can deploy changes.
Especially Ethereum is firmly in the hands of Buterin and company.
Both depend on each other.
Without miners, no currency, without code no mining, without very high algo difficulty, no safety.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Git can be use alone whereas the utility of a cryptocurrency is in the network. You don't say that a video game is "decentralized" because you can play offline do you?
I touch on a lot of issues you mentioned in the last third of the article. I agree that decentralization removes accountability, protections, and the associated trust.
Moreover, with crypto, we are trusting the developers of the underlying software rather than government institutions for fiat. I would argue there isn't a compelling reason developers should be seen as more trustworthy.
To be honest, I went into researching for this article with a bias against cryptocurrency, but ended with a belief that there is possibly an opportunity for fiat + crypto to form a more trustworthy system where transactions + the creation of new currency was logged where everyone can see. However, to actually realize this would require a lot of changes in current crypto architecture (particularly around the consensus algorithm and its current computation cost).
This all reads like straight propaganda from /r/bitcoin and none of it is true.
Decentralization of a currency doesn't mean or have to do with development, that is a separate issue. Still, whoever controls github commits is going to control the reference implementation and that isn't many people.
Decentralization refers to being able to use money electronically without any third party's permission. All the rest of this are obvious talking points to try to redefine bitcoin as more unique than it is. It was always completely possible to copy everything and modify any part of it. Part of the excitement is that there is actual competition in currencies.
Non mining nodes ensure transactions/blocks followed certain rules. When attached to wallets and services, that means much more than "just relaying blocks".
This part is just a straight lie and someone has grossly mislead you. Non mining blocks have nothing to do with making blocks or deciding anything. All they can do is relay blocks that the miner decide. This is like someone printing books, those books being sold on amazon and a hundred other stores, then someone arguing that a single library deciding not to carry a book has any bearing on that book being created.
3. Layer 1 scaling is poor design. Larger blockchain = less nodes due to more expensive hardware requirements = more centralization. BSV and BCH are mostly dead because of getting this wrong, no debate about it.
When people say things like this it's obvious that they only get information from /r/bitcoin and don't have understanding beyond the heavily curated narrative there. Do you ever stop to think about why other cryptocurrencies don't need a second layer? Do you think the optimal throughput is a few kilobytes per second worth of transactions for the whole world? It all has to be synced on the main chain anyway. A second layer is a solution in search of a problem.
Larger blockchain = less nodes due to more expensive hardware requirements
Have you ever done the math on this? I can never believe people keep repeating something so obviously wrong. Bitcoin runs at dialup speed. A $10 per month VPS literally runs at 50,000 times the speed that the bitcoin network does. There have been times when average transaction costs spiked so high one transaction fee could pay for the hard drive space and vps time to host a node for months. The craziest thing here is that nodes don't even really matter. The miners can broadcast blocks themselves and anyone can sync with the chain if they want.
I think there's many outright lies about decentralisation told in crypto circles. So many ethereum contracts turn out to have a central override that one party can control. 'Decentralised' systems often turn out to have a company in charge so that they can make money off of an app. Even blockchains are allegedly decentralised, and yet all it takes is a couple of mining pool owners to collaborate to gain overall control of the thing.
Are there any real decentralised systems out there that couldn't be controlled or overruled by a few well-placed individuals working together?
Cryptocurrency in the real world (as opposed to rhetoric and original intent) is more about censorship/suppression resistance and resilience than decentralization.
A coin might be fairly centralized, but the centralized coders and miners are replaceable in an organic fashion. If they were all shut down others could pop up and even if there were forks one fork could eventually triumph over others.
there can be no immediate decentralisation the way you want to put it. The moment an OSS system is being implemented there is a main contributor and a core team of devs. It would take years for a system to be completely independent. Bitcoin is approaching towards this goal. But to think that decentralisation is useless because the devs along with the miners and users decided by consensus that a bug was indeed a bug is the wrong approach.
We should remember the most often centralized aspect of blockchain projects promising a fully-decentralized future: the developer teams. They are typically very centralized with disproportionate power over the network. See the graphs in the second half of this article:
This isn't necessarily damning, as "everything has to start somewhere," but it definitely doesn't warrant self-congratulatory pats on the back exclaiming a decentralized utopia. There's still a lot of work to do, but these projects might be the furthest along we've seen after open-source software.
Are blockchains truly decentralized when a small central group of developers control their codebase? Sure, you can choose not to use the latest version, but then you're likely not going to be part of the main network.
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