Topic: Is ETH decentralized? (Read 647 times)

Ethereum is an open source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. It supports a modified version of Nakamoto consensus via transaction-based state transitions.

Ethereum provides a decentralized virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes. The virtual machine's instruction set, in contrast to others like Bitcoin Script, is Turing-complete. "Gas", an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.

Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale that took place between July and August 2014. The system then went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million coins minted. This accounts for about 65 percent of the total circulating supply in April 2020[5].[6][non-primary source needed]

In 2016, as a result of the exploitation of a flaw in The DAO project's smart contract software, and subsequent theft of $50 million worth of ether, Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains – the new separate version became Ethereum (ETH) with the theft reversed,[8] and the original chain continued as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

This really needs to be verified. because the blockchains chain cannot be simply branched out. It is a ledger and the transactions will be recorded therein. I am not too knowledgeable about blockchain technology of Ethereum platform but I have read a lot about general blockchain technology today. so to be more confident the other guy needs to give the link. or he misheard somewhere about this information.

Please, you can stop said BS about ethereum 2.0 and that's not a new kind of crypto. The POS system has exist since a long time ago and there was no reason to call it as a good thing right now.
It's good to be a short term bet.

Regardless of how popular is ethereum, the project is not fully decentralised and isn't popular because of its decentralisation. It became a heaven for scammers and thiefs.
As Vitalic is still maintaining the EVM by interfering, i can say that eth is still under development until the moment announcement from Vitalik that he left the project for real like what satoshi did. Eth is a useful crypto, it won't lose value because of the absence of its ceo. But at the same time, someone should still have that power to fix errors.

Etherum is decentralized and It is free and even easy to access by most newbies, it is easy to create its smart contracts and run it, its even easier to create an etherum wallet.

Ignore vitaliks influence on the project and let's focus on the positives, i see etherum more decentralized than most altcoins

Of course, Ethereum is decentralized. Bcz if no one controls the price of Eth it can be said easly eth is decentralized . so far Eth has been good from in development, ETH 2.0 will be launched soon, and this is a new generation of cryptocurrency. So for to me, it's just a good one to choose .

Yes, Ethereum is decentralized.
It is open-source and enables the creation of smart contracts.

Another fact that any services that are centralized can be decentralized using Ethereum.

Well... Bitcoin doesn't have that one person (or a team) that could have influence on the miners with their statements. Bitcoin forks that you mentioned (BCH and BSV) have influential person but they have nothing to do with Bitcoin.



The price of Ethereum (or any other project) has nothing to do with it being centralized or decentralized. Here is the article describing the difference between centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges. The same concept can be applied to all crypto projects.

Do you still think that the creator of Ethereum is the one controlling the price? That is NO. He can only use his influence on people and perhaps manipulate the minds of investors, only if they agree to it. He cannot outrightly control te price. Ethereum is already a community coin and that is why it is still alive till today, else it would have been a long-forgotten thing or would have totally lost its value.
Had it been it is not decentralized, the total supply can be easily increased, it might be subject to changes in security and people would have lost their coins unknowingly. In fact, you will not have full control on your asset, particularly your private key.

That's not only happening with ethereum. Even bitcoin does it. If you were seeing how there was a lot of dramas before BCH and BSV born. Roger, Jihan, CSW have also become an influential person in the bitcoin community that makes the community got divided.
In a big community and this is a common thing when there was an influential person. Tron community has justin sun too

All he did was show you proof that ETH was anything but decentralized and this example he showed was the exact reason for many years I did not like ETH,,, and even never bought it for anything. It seemed to me just awful that you could reverse blockhain and make immutability worthless. Every transaction you made after the hack was removed, every ETH you mined was also removed.

But I have changed my mind about it in the years that followed. They have proved their ideals, and Vitalik is not such an idiot now.

Of course, Ethereum is decentralized. And Vitaliy has been making changes for 2 years, it is not so easy and not so fast. Friend, I think if you don’t like a coin, just don’t use it. Now there are a lot of coins, there is plenty to choose from. I do not see serious arguments supported by figures. So for me, it's just a personal dislike. And not a cold calculation.

I think if no one controls the price of Ethereum it can be said to be decentralized, but if there is someone who controls the price we need to be suspicious, so far Ethereum has been good from project development, ETH 2.0 will be launched, and that is a new generation of cryptocurrencies.

I didn't get any information from your suggested list. As far I know Ethereum is Decentralize, only limitations is for privacy of transaction. You can track down Ethereum transaction history, Vitalik Buterin didn't it for manipulate the market. Ethereum rollout from DAO, the reason is secure transaction but you have full control on your wallet.

I will say Ethereum is not fully decentralized, because the creator still holds a vast amount or rather controls a good amount of the coin but even at that, it still doesn't limit the potential of the blockchain, of which a good number of persons knows that Ethereum is the best altcoin. Till date, the only blockchain I see as being fully decentralized is the Bitcoin blockchain others aren't because the team will always hold a good amount of the coin which gives them power to do many things.

I never think any other altcoin will lead the top second position because Bitcoin and Ethereum is the two eyes of crypto currency so other altcoin will stay in a below range. I hope it take some to surpass the Ethereum but again it will beat the all the time. Nowadays all are busy to tackle the current situation so Crypto is a perfect platform for all kind of situation.

Something being encrypted doesn't mean it's decentralized. Your account login credentials on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Google are encrypted, but those companies are obviously not decentralized. Both words are literally different lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption

Lol, there should be no middle ground here, it's either Ethereum is decentralised or not.

If we are talking about mining power, how big is the miners involved here? For me Ethereum is pretty much centralised simply because of Vitalik at the helm because of his influence. His every though on let's say the economics and governance of Ethereum has a huge impact on the project itself.

It was then first to recognize as a decentralized market and it was then changing as the market behaviors change also. To the fact that Vitalik tried to control ETH price, we can't tell anymore that it is still decentralized. Maybe it wasn't Vitalik's urge to have the change but the matter that he announces it, it is clear enough that he was part of the decision and surely there is a reason why it goes like this or they would like to change it as CEX.


I hope you are right but actually, you have something to read about and this possibly will enlighten your understanding towards ETH.

Yes we all know ETH is one of the second decetralized coins in crypto and would be always a top 2 in the market.
Maybe it should be take time to realize to other altcoins to surpass ETH, But it have some altcoins supass ETH in the top two chart but its only short of time.

Well am still new in this space but with the little understand have gathered I would support the motion that eth is decentralized since every single transaction carried out on the chain is encrypted

Due to DAO hack Ethereum lost many fans, because one of the biggest blockchain values is the irreversibility of the transaction, which has been refuted. I know, that community agreed on, but, it was a mistake and you can´t change the paradigm of the blockchain, right?

I have to agree with bitgolden here. Vitalik succeded to convince the majority to switch to Ethereum and abandon ETC but it doesn't he has an eltimate control over the network. I believe eth community is matture enough and will not follow him if he makes with a bad decision.
What if Roger Ver succeeded to convince the community to switch to BCH? Would we accuse bitcoin of being centralised!?

yes! eth is decentralized and best asset after btc and eth blockchain is pretty strong and secure.eth price dropped but if you see the overall market you will see whole market falls.

ETH is purely decentralised and a precious asset in crypto market, and no one believed that suddenly vitalik will sell ETH. And this caused a big fall in the crypto market..

Not only ETH most of the coins alts dropped suddenly and that's why most of them switch to BTC to save their holdings, however just forget about the past and move forward to see a positive trend.

Having control over something and having influence over something two very different things. Vitalik has influence over ETH and if he says something clever, for example like the PoS ethereum 2.0, people do listen, what he has to do to change all of ethereum is just get people to listen to him and follow him, we are all like that, if I want to change something in ETH and people do listen to me and follow me we can change it as well. This is not control, this is basically politics, and I am sorry to say but politics are very important during forks because people decide on which fork to follow depending on whoever is a better politician, every single transaction on the forks are basically votes and whichever fork is voted more will get a lot more attention.

Vitalik is the president of ethereum lets say, but every single move he makes he has to be voted for it, and if he gets the votes he does whatever he wants but that doesn't mean it is centralized at all, people are still deciding it.

The fact that Vitalik decided to roll back means he controls ETH and can manipulate ETH which means he is the central authority to this platform. Its been one of the topics being debated long time ago, it's been used to fud ETH as well. But none of it matters if they trust Vitalik with his decision. Whether its centralize or not, the smart contract makes money.

Thanks for sharing the article. After reading it, I am a bit convinced that I might be wrong in believing that Ethereum is decentralized. And yeah a switch towards PoS would worsen it further as it can easily be manipulated when compared to PoW.

Agreed with this. Security is more of an issue, when compared to decentralization. Recently, there have been a number of incidents, which laid bare the security vulnerabilities of Ethereum. And I expect the situation to get worse after the implementation of Ethereum 2.0. From what I heard, the developers are ignoring a number of issues, so that they can roll out ETH 2.0 sometime soon.

Ethereum is an open software platform based on blockchain technology that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications.

Probably not well decentralized but it looks like the stakeholders and developers are really working hard to properly decentralize it. Just hope they do it the right way.
Every community member will need to be part of keeping Ethereum safe and decentralized in the future. Things like having +100,000  Ethereum members to easily run full nodes to fully monitor the network,  check and balance things in a Blockchain-friendly manner will matter alot.

The roll back of transaction is actually important. It should be done via consensus though. If there is undeniable proof that a user/address stole from people, the user should lose his/her censorship resistant right and the money recovered.

Biggest ETH problem is not decentralisation but security. Why reversing block chain need to happen in first place. And there was many incidents later on. ETH is an experiment. Not a place where you want to keep your wealth. 

Recently, ETH has planned to switch on PoS which I think more risky because with more weight or balance, anyone can manipulate. However, I think Vitalik owns such amount of ETH to manipulate the network. That's the different between PoS and PoW. Anyone with a huge fund can manipulate a chain in PoS while with huge fund in PoW, they have no power of manipulation in the chain.

Again, the fact that majority agreed with him is one major point. Think if the one who made the proposal to rollback the chain was someone else that's not Vitalik, I could guarantee it would get a lot lower attention. Look at the Binance hack as an example, whereas CZ was initially interested in doing a sort of rollback to regain control of the stolen funds. What happened? People crapped on CZ.

Ether is very centralized, as Vitalik holds a good bunch of the premined coins still. Doesn't seem like people care at all, as he did amazingly well with his platform.

I'm not a fan of centralized projects, regardless of how popular they may seem, this includes Ripple and a few others on the list.
Been a fan of Blocknet since the very beginning, since everything is funded through super blocks, meaning everything is voted for. The investors decides how the money is spent, and where. It's pretty cool.
They are all about decentralization, mostly known for their DEX, but also works on their own oracle network, and Infura solution which is actually far more powerful than Ethereums. 

You can consider a mid term, not totally decentralized, because Vitalik have a lot of power in ETH of course, and I don't blame him, it's his own coin and at least he try to do his best to improving ETH
And it's a good job, it's the biggest altcoin and have a real use, it works, so there's no problem to ETH

ETH is decentralized. Vitalik Buterin able to forked ETH to rollback transactions from DAO hack because there are many ETH users who stood with his action. Yes, he is a leading figure of ETH but ETH users agree with that course of action so it isn't like Vitalik Buterin could do whatever he wants without the agreement with ETH users at that time.

Well he has control over it so we could not say it is decentralized right?

Credits to Wiki.

That tells it all. Actually, the answer to your question lies in your own statement which had been done before.
The fact that he have authority over it is the answer.
You could always use bitcoin for easier comparison.

True, all of the EIPs has to be accepted by the majority of the miners in order to be implemented. No one is saying that Vitalik can implement an EIP by himself. But his opinions are very influential and most miners will accept whatever he says. That's why I'm saying that Ethereum is pseudo-decentralized.

Any decision that has already taken by ethereum developer will put miners as a party that plays a big role. I guess you must need to read the whole story of DAO hack. I just suggest you read this
https://medium.com/@ogucluturk/the-dao-hack-explained-unfortunate-take-off-of-smart-contracts-2bd8c8db3562

Just like that the implementation fo the EIP will never happen if the majority of miners say no for that proposal. This is similar as when bitcoin was also doing BIP and the community ( miners) were voting for which proposal that made them all interested.

You are correct, with PoS, Vitalik will have more power in the ETH chain and it will get more centralized. So, basically PoS is the opposite for ETH what it was supposed to be.

If anyone has so much influence in certain asset, that can never be called decentralized. Bitmover was correct, that was the end of ETH although I did not know anything about it.

Reading all these comments, I think it would be better to say that Ethereum network is decentralized but the problem is that Vitalik's influence is just too big. And probably every decision that he make will be OK with the community. Because of that influence, I would describe Ethereum as pseudo-decentralized network. Would you agree?

Pretty much convince that ethereum was once a decentralized space for cryptocurrency before. However, since a lot happened on their network and much controversy had been exposed with their CEO Vitalik It safes to assume its no longer the case. Remember what does it mean by decentralized? A framework and structure that allows people except government or any central authorities to have control over the network. That contradicts to many claim of ethereum with its activity.

This is a good discussion why we should believe ethereum is not decentralized.

ethereum isnt decentralized and other myths

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_{OP I'm pretty sure this thread belong to Altcoin Discussion}

Theoretically, purely based on its structure, it is decentralized. But as all members above said, the reality says the opposite.

I never really liked that much the way ETH even works. I dunno - it gives me a weird vibe as if I am not under complete control of my wallet. It's sad how a coin can be promoted as decentralized when there is a huge manpower laying over the entire coin and willing to conquer it even more.

If one has the power to do such a large & full-of-consequences move, run away.

Which addresses belong to Vitalik and the foundation?

The "pre-mine" in the genesis block was distributed to pre-sale investors. Implying that the developers own it all is ridiculous.

You nailed it. The same with Steve Jobs & Apple, Bill Gates & Microsoft, Warren Buffett & Berkshire Hathaway, they have so much influence on those companies. Each statement they say have huge impact on investors' emotion and decisions. In crypto, statements from developers are more influent from technical side. For Ethereum and Vitalik, I don't think Vitalik will leave Ethereum and stay in the shadow like what satoshi did for bitcoin, years ago. And if he want to do so, he will be not able to do this because everyone knows him. He is not anonymous like satoshi.

ETH was supposed to do just one thing. Run smart-contracts in a decentralized, trustless and efficient manner. It was imagined that the use-cases would eventually come. Unfortunately the money grabs that happened in its wake in the form of ICOs took away all the focus from development to greed and the next pump and dump for traders/ ICO devs to make money from.
It has probably been the single biggest drain of technical manpower in the last century with thousands of these scam devs working their way to generate template for the next token while spending time to write nonsense whitepapers and websites. Ethereum has been exploited and the example was laid down by the founders themselves.

As far as decentralization is concerned, the GPU miners are the ones contributing to mining pools and those are fairly spread out. The top two pools account for around 30 and 20% of total haspower respectively. That is further divided into the individual GPU miners. The hashing power is sufficiently decentralized imo. Further as far as governance is concerned, that is surely not the case as one person calls the shots on development as well as calamity resolution.

Further still, decentralization on ethereum means little because the idea of DApps that it proposed has turned out to be a failure due to the transaction rates. Even if they move to PoS, the situation would not change. EOS is already a POS chain and has no promising DApps development that shows any proof that there is any need for them. The time remaining for Eth to actually prove itself with a use-case is shrinking fast.

Regardless if forking out the DAO hack is the right decision or not, whether or not it gave Ethereum a positive effect or not, the main point is that Vitalik's influence is just too big.

As for the Roger Ver example, yes sure. But the difference with Bitcoin is that while there are lots of sort of "influencers", there's A LOT of them and their respective influences are more equally shared. Erik Voorhees, Andreas Antonopoulos, Adam Back, Pieter Wuille, Nick Szabo, Jameson Lopp, and the list goes on and on. In contrast to Ethereum whereas the influence is heavily skewed towards Vitalik, and a very low influence for a smaller diverse group of people.

short answer is no.

it is not only about the influence of one person although that is a valid reason, it is mostly about the network itself. there is only a handful of real full nodes running on ethereum blockchain and the rest which is about 95% of the nodes are running simplified versions that do not verify or even download the entire blockchain. that is also why they could easily roll back since nobody had any voice on that chain!

additionally the day ETH switches to PoS it centralizes even more since by then those who have the premined millions of Ether will have the biggest power and those people are Vitalik and the foundation which are all in same group.

Yeah it sounds a bit contradictory. But I tried to mean is that only because the majority chose to be with Vitalik ETH is were it is now. Else, ETC would have been in its place. For example, Roger is not the creator of Bitcoin but he was a influential in the Bitcoin community, however the majority stood with BTC not BCH. I think you get what I tried to mean.
The reentrancy issue resulted in the DAO hack and the same issue resulted in the recent dForce hack. They should have fixed the bug instead of roll over but doesn't mean the network is centralised.

No offense, but you do realize that your statement is actually somewhat a contradiction right?

I think Ethereum is decentralized, yeah Vitalik is influential so but the majority of the community stood with him resulting in the forks ETH and ETC. My current opinion on ETH is that it is decentralised but buggy and the bugs need to be fixed. That's the main reason for the frequent attacks on smart contracts.

Because it isn't; simply because Vitalik simply has so much influence over Ethereum. It's safe to assume that this is one of the main reasons Satoshi left the Bitcoin community and went into the shadows— because he/she/they knew that their influence would be too big.

ETH is the 2nd largest crypto as per the market capital. Till now, I did not know that once upon a time in 2016, Vitalik Buterin has forked ETH to rollback transactions from DAO hack. I knew from here- https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.54262172
So, if the creator of the ETH can fork the blockchain to reverse or in other words to manipulate the chain, how can it be decentralized?
Share your opinion.