How CENTRALIZED is Cardano?
How CENTRALIZED Iis BTC?
What is the most centralized coin out there?
What is the most decentralized coin out there?
The more I look at this question, the more confused I get!!
As I research various ALTCOINS I often here statements saying that BTC is too centralized because of the strong mining pools and because of powerful whales… YET… when I listen closely to BTC maximalists they continuously point out that BTC is not “run by” any company or any one person - rather, it is “run by” a community.
On the other hand we have people supporting various ALTCOINS and the main arguments made in their favour are often that the founder is someone with a lot of talent, integrity and back-record (Hoskinson, Larimer, Macaleb, Vitalek etc etc), but BTC guys are saying that having a “leader” means having centralization in that what if the leader gets corrupted?
Does anyone have any thoughts on centralization? What should we be looking for, what is ideal?
Personally I got interested in blockchain primarily because of it’s extreme decentralization, but the more I learn about it and observe it the more I see that even BTC is far far from decentralized. And I also can see the shortcomings it endures because of the decentralization it does have.
I like the idea of a strong, talented, and trustworthy leader/founder who can keep things ‘on track’ but finally I am aware that this is just a childish fantasy > like a child wanting and believing he can have a strong Daddy who will always be perfect and reliable… does this ever really exist? No it doesn’t because finally we are all human.
So what is the ultimate answer to the question of centralization vs. decentralization? Or trust vs trustless systems?
its better to have a centralized and transparent holder like iohk, cardano an emurgo holding 5 bil, than having 1 mil of satoshis btc blocked and having no clue what could ever happen to them… from this point of view- ada’s limited supplu - POS rewards and transparent genesis block is the best way
Great questions. I think you will enjoy reading the Staking-Why do we do it paragraph from @MegaWind’s pool website, which tackles issues such as 51% attack and compares PoS to PoW
Most people don’t even grasp the concept of centralization/decentralization, they do not even share the same definition of it…
There are altcoins where their developers can kill their coin (stopping the transactions and many others way) and the users will not be able to do anything about it, that’s what I call centralized coins.
This is not the case with Bitcoin.
The fact that most of the hashing power may be hold by a few individual and make it vulnerable to some attack is not relevant. Also, no such attack has been detected at this date, people make a lot of shortcuts, 70% of hashing power coming from China do not mean one individual or entity own it, people invest where they can buy cheap hashing power.
Believing in those “leaders” is more an opinion than anything else, I can’t give you advice on that, but those with backgrounds are unlikely to get corrupted, they will more likely fall down because of bad design choices than corruption.
Here we go again about centralization vs. decentralization, there is a wide unclear gap between the two, when Ethereum devs decided to push an update to “correct” the DAO “hack”, people realized the ethereum blockchain is not as intouchable as they thought, but a fork is possible with Ethereum, and that’s what they did (Ethereum classic).
So how would you call coins like Ethereum ? Is a coin still centralized if you can make a fork and stop following the main devs, or do you see centralization as a pure technical term ?
Obviously ETH is centralized. The blockchain “roll-back” that took place proves that. Also I’d say Vitalik can probably pretty much do what he likes with ETH. He seems like a decent little ET, but still, that is centralization. [benevolent dictator ]
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