The rules of the ETH network allow for this regulatory capture to happen as well. Decentralized governance means you may not get your way when the majority think differently.
It's not about distributed governance; it's about abusing a dominant role in consensus. PoS is easier to capture, allowing the dominant party to censor and manipulate the settlement chain.
As for governance, with Bitcoin everyone is equally powerless to dictate how things should go. If you appreciate the fixed ruleset, you can choose to participate.
Ethereum is far more nebulous, being piloted by a foundation which hardforks the protocol at will.
Tbh, I don't get your analogy, why should the miners be looked at as bodyguards? While I agree the miners are responsible for protecting the network, I don't think you can draw a distinction that easily between an eth holder vs a miner, because anyone can become a miner and anyone can become a holder and an entity can be both a miner and a holder. Everyone who participates in the eth network should have the power to vote in this blockchain, if its actually decentralized.
The problem here is with the design of eth, eth was a rushed blockchain from the start, now vitalik is trying to rush the release all of a sudden because the people managing his network are not happy with the up coming changes?
What the hell kind of decentralization is this if vitalik can escalate major decisions about network? Eth is not a decentralized project if one individual(or a few) can decide to go against 51% of the stakeholders of the network.
But this is an odd conundrum. If Ethereum is decentralized, any such change must be achieved by a vote. Circumventing such a vote is detrimental to the eco-system in the long term, wouldn't you agree?
What's happening is people are voting with their feet. Anyone can make any fork they like, and then everyone on the network can choose which one they prefer to use. That is what decentralization means. And both Ethereum and Bitcoin have that property.
I'm not saying the basis of ETH consensus is based on inter-personal trust. The conversation started by a complaint of 32 ETH required to run a validator being out of reach of normal people, so I provided multiple other options for how a normal person can take part in this.
It's more like, people who hold a large enough stake can collude on what rules the blockchain implements. Lets say an Ethereum 3.0 is proposed that benefits the blockchain at the slight expense of stakeholders, you think they'll approve that proposal?
Miners in Proof of Work don’t control the rules. There have been multiple attempts to exercise hash power as political control in Bitcoin that have failed. There already exists precedent regarding the political power of running your own node with incredibly low capital requirements relative to mining.
Ethereum is already in a battle over what consensus rules actually exist. Large scale staking enterprises such as exchanges are signaling their intent to follow extra-protocol conventions, and if they control a supermajority of staked ETH, they control the right to slash. The only way to have a voice in it is by acquiring $50,000 in ETH.
A hard fork in a decentralized cryptocurrency is democratic, users chose which of the 2 new chains assets' they want to keep. No binary winner is decided, the market currently values ETH as 122 times more valuable than ETC, but ETC is not censored.
The sentencing of criminals in republics is very removed from democratic action (see drug criminalization).
How decentralised and democratic is the steering and decision making in reality?
Nobody elects the mining pool operators, nobody elects the people owning the mining hardware and not enough people elect the people who are steering the various crypto foundation.
If a crypto blows up and becomes essential to a countrys economy the vast ordinary citizens will only participate in it by earning money and spending it for their needs.
For those people you just replaced a somewhat accountable government, with somewhat predictable financial policies and transparency processes with one nobody knows anything about which is perhaps operating far away and in a different culture/country.
For many people in the world that'll mean less influence on the decision making process.
In other words: There is no fundamental reason to trust the Ethereum Foundation more than the ECB or the Fed.
I keep seeing this idea invoked over and over again, and it's starting to bug me. The problem with this idea is that it conflates technical decentralization and the spirit or ideals of decentralization. The latter can be betrayed or degraded even while the former is preserved. Just because the miners aren't compelled by the network architecture to implement a fork doesn't mean that there aren't social dynamics which have the effect of centralizing decisions made by those miners. "Consensus" doesn't have any inherent value or rightness. Consensus is just a majority of a group electing to do something. In the world of the decentralized web, consensus is positive only when network nodes are truly acting autonomously. It's best when this means that each node acts in self-interest, without regard for or in ignorance of the interests or positions of the other nodes. This is not what's happening on the Ethereum network. There's a huge amount of coordination. Ethereum is a network that hasn't individuated itself from a relatively small group of creators/maintainers/community members. As long as the network depends on these people for strength and stability, the miners will be biased to carry out the wishes of those people. Otherwise the miners risk losing whatever value they've accrued through their work. So yes, the fork only happens through a consensus of the miners. But it hasn't been established that the miners are capable of independent action.
People cast votes (digitally mind you, which is always great and unproblematic and very secure also) and then a very tiny minority executed what is, by every standard imposed by cryptoheads, illegitimate behavior. That's more or less the definition of a referendum, which makes the ETH foundation and a top percentage of miners an executive government.
It's about trust, you either trust some central solitary authority, i.e. government, bank, etc... or you trust the majority of users -- to do the right thing.
Think of it like a dictatorship vs a democracy. In the dictatorship one guy ( the central authority ) gets to make the rules... he has a bad day? he decides to take all your wealth for himself. In the democracy 51% of nodes have to decide to screw you, some people think that's a better bet in the long run.
I guess I didn’t think of that bc I don’t consider myself important enough to be overruled by so many people.
Possibly the good thing about the ecosystem is anyone can make a protocol or form the existing open source ones and then users and miners can vote with their feet.
If that’s what you took away from my post, I must have done a poor job with it.
Firstly emergent consensus is a big part of decentralized systems. Core providers convening on a decision and supporting it is perfectly healthy. That’s quite different than a CEO saying things will be X way and everyone just having to accept it.
Additionally, my point is that people WILL likely try to have a contentious chain (as is their right in a decentralized project), but due to the maturity of Ethereum the technical consequences are much more impactful than the BTC/BCH scenario.
I'm saying that the main rule for all blockchains (not only Ethereum) is that consensus is decided by the majority. This is their "constitution". The majority of the stakeholders in a blockchain can decide to change the consensus rules. In a traditional legal system majority is not required, laws can be changed by relativly few people.
I'm very much deep in crypto, "have skin in the game" big time. But are you being honest there?
A majority of coins are owned by corporations. Some coins already have governance through staked amount of coins. ETH2.0 and PoS will centralize the power to the majority holders of ETHs.
When that happens, corporate/"whale" investors will decide the future implementations. Either through governance voting, or just by basically clogging the execution & blockchain through a strike.
Thanks, this is exactly what I wanted to know. You make a good point about the social rules. The biggest hole in the entire system is the network is still dictated entirely by these rules and the main client is the vessel in which all these rules are set.
But its not set in stone and the lead developers do have a huge amount of control.
Also many disagreements in the forum about the max block size and blocking Satoshi Dice do worry me.
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