Topic: The chink in the armor: traces of centralization (Read 292 times)

You cannot repair the chinks in the armor without using lower-quality mail!
*I am no blacksmith however, so I might be wrong.

The best option is to just forge a new armor. With plate mail or something. In the metaphor with cryptocurrency that would be to make a privacy coin.

Fortunately for us, this has already been done. It is called Monero.

No, I am not shilling for Monero. Just pointing out that it exists. And it is apparently immune to legislation and cannot be weakened by it.

I see BTC <=> XMR atomic swaps becoming a thing.

That sounds great, but can you really stop the people from using centralized exchanges and centralized altcoins? I don't think so.
Can you really make BTC mining more decentralized by redistributing the hash power among a bigger pool of smaller miners? I don't think so.
It's cool to play the role of a "decentralization maximalist", but most things that you want to change are almost impossible to be changed, because there won't be any consensus among the crypto community. The people are free to use whatever crypto services they want(at their own risk).

Bitcoin was very unique because it was the first of its own. Satoshi’s unique idea gave way for others to base their works on his work and try to replicate it. For example, facebook became insanely popular because it was a new concept and no one’s ever heard of it before. But now many have created their own social medias and it’s hard to breakthrough and make something unique.

I think people’s need for clout and attention is what prevents them from doing what Satoshi did. Knowing what bitcoin is and what bitcoin could be, they now want to have that. Do you think satoshi expected for bitcoin to reach these heights?

The problem with that really good solution is that there's bound to be a resistance happening when the patching on those chink on the armor, take for example, bitcoin.org, I don't think that the owner of that website would want to relinquish control of such a good website right? If there's a way that we can prevent profit loss or interest removal from the people that's bound to get hit with the repairs of those vulnerability, we would probably see that it's going to be easy to do all of it without any hitch, but the compromises are going to be difficult to fathom for anyone of us, this deserves some sort of consortium or summit.

The problem starts right from the beginning, it shows how people just jump into anything without full understanding of the innovation, Bitcoin want meant to be used far away from any platforms that are centralized.

If this was respected everyone will be trading Bitcoin via P2P only or decebtralized exchanges, lack of understanding the necessity of Decentralisation is why people carried Bitcoin into the hands of a centralized exchange, they are using it wrongly.

And many people don't even care.

Blown cover in what way? Or does this have anything to do with wallet addresses that have been shared on this forum already? I don't think that should blown anyone's cover still, I read that Nakamoto had an account on this forum and I became active after a while, so anyone can still do what nakamoto did and have an account on here then go into hiding if they believe in what they created.

I do not know the context you or anyone else has said it, but for the big, scheming exchanges, people listen cause they want to trust something. The exchanges do not even need to try, but they do with SAFU and when they (coinbase) tried to create what they were calling a non custodian wallet, though it was very far from that.

- Jay -

How come I or some other random person can say "SAFU" and nobody listens, but some giant scheming exchange without your best interests in mind can say it and everyone believes them and calms down?

Ever thought of that?

Depending on the case it could mean removal of the traces of centralization as much as possible (eg. in case of mining pools) and in other cases it could mean inventing alternatives (eg. in case of CEX we should offer a truly decentralized exchange, in case of server-dependent SPV wallets we should offer more decentralized SPV clients).

Mining (actual hashrate) and mining pools need to be spread around the globe specially in independent countries as much as possible. They should remain in US as much as they should have remained in China and as much as they should be created in other countries like El Salvador.

That's how we achieve true decentralization. In a peer-to-peer network, we can not eliminate malicious "peers", we just populate the network with enough "honest peers" that the malicious one doesn't affect anything.
That's the same with pools, we don't need to remove a malicious pools but we should make them ineffective. For example the reason why the malicious MARA pool is not a serious threat is because it has ~3-4% of the hashrate. But there are other pools with higher hashrate and some are located inside same jurisdiction...

Understanding the problem is a first start
Before a Doctor starts treatment, Diagnosis are taken after finding the problem
Solution starts coming in.
Centralization has already sipped into the bone of civilization and decentralization is seen as a form of anarchy.
The sad thing is not many are interested in privacy or freedom
Many selling their data in form of KYC for some tokens.
If it would be possible to create a decentralized exchange where changes can be made by majority vote and there would exist equality no matter how many of a coin an individual have
Everybody would be entitled to a vote as long as they hold a stake in the exchange.
The notion that the amount or how powerful a body is the more the control is one thing that's fighting against decentralization and I believe that's one issue with mining pool of Bitcoin.
Back to my hypothetical exchange 
It would serve more like a market in introducing interested buyers and sellers anonymously and maybe a code or AI to serve as escrow by only allowing a connection if a user have said amount( to prevent fraud) in their wallet via explorer.
Or better still something of similarity with monero.
Well me speaking jargons
Know nothing about coding.

How can this problem be solved if governments decide that they do not want centralization? In the end, developers are individuals and have families and do not want to confront the government.
Mining pools can be moved outside the United States, but it is still possible to establish a legislative framework between several countries and it is easy to know where mining is located.
Using a full node may be a solution but the developers are still known and you must use a central site to download the software, synchronization is slow and not everyone may be able to manage a full node.

This is true and are part of the heavy giants we are having against the use of traditional local currencies of fiat, we cannot go by the continuation of a centralized financial means and expect that everything concerning our financial economy to change for good when they are under the control of central authorities, government are the main brain behind this, because they will always wanted to have control over our finances, but thanks to Satoshi for making bitcoin a success upon several attempts from other developers which availed to nothing.

I guess the question is what we mean by eradication. Being aware and personally avoiding centralized services is one thing. I agree that it's a good thing to do, and perhaps we even need a platform that would helpfully sort out those intricate and not so intricate cases, so that a person could just find the necessary info in one place. But if eradication means lobbying for bans of centralized services or trying to impose some sort of restrictions, then I don't support it because I believe that an ability to choose between centralized and decentralized options is a part of financial freedom which Bitcoin is all about.

Probably one of the reasons why centralization thrives is that the market is apathetic about it. You sell the public with centralized services and they take it. It's sad to see decentralization being prostituted by private and centralized companies, but what's even sadder is that you actually don't have to mislead the public, to market lies, to make false promotions.

The truth is that you don't have to falsely claim that what you're offering is a decentralized service or a peer-to-peer service. Many here, for example, are well-informed about the basics and yet they willingly prefer centralization.

Chink and traces connote a small or tiny amount. The reality is that centralization is brazenly mainstream. I'm afraid it is already the rule rather than the exemption.

There's also a strange beauty to this: Bitcoin is decentralized and independent the way it is because there was no real incentive to run this as anything else but a "hobby" project, albeit a highly sophisticated one (of course speculation existed from its very beginning, but Bitcoin's success was far from certain). Yet without being as decentralized and independent the way it was from the get-go, I doubt Bitcoin would have ever gotten the traction it did.



While satoshi's anonymity is a great bonus I don't think it's even that big a factor. It's the challenge of finding someone with the expertise to pull something like this off and the willingness to completely leave it into the hands of the public.

Bitcoin was financially worthless with Satoshi had created it, there was only the incentive of decentralization.

The only problem is, Satoshi had the heart to be anonymous, and i'm not sure we can find another character like that, since most of us who are posting here or elsewhere in Bitcoinsphere have already blown their covers.

That's why we need more independent/international developers who would create different tools and more independent reviewers who would look at the code of those tools and let others know how they work, whether they have a vulnerability, etc.
Specifically reviewers is something I feel like we're lacking. People who can read code just don't spend time doing so... and if they do, they are not vocal enough...

That would be a paradox because a server by definition works in a hierarchy in the server <> client relationship whereas in a decentralized peer-to-peer network all participants are at the same level (peers) without any servers.

Incidents like the case with Samourai wallet have a silver lining, they act as a wake up call that reminds us of vulnerabilities and forces us to think about solutions before a catastrophe happens. We don't have to come up with a solution right away but it is a good thing to first know the problem and strive to solve it.

The reminder is good that people mostly believe that Decentralized Exchanges are actually decentralized. From your example, I hope they can see a red flag that centralized companies and teams are behind these DEX.

At the end, there are centralized entities and people that can be targets of governments and regulations so that these DEX can be shut down any time with a sanction from national government and international cooperation.

This will be the hardest part.

It's easy to avoid CEX, we have plenty way to trade e.g. no KYC P2P, DEX, this forum, direct P2P.

It's quite easy to run full node, just need time and storage.

But if all of the pools agree to censor the transactions that asked by SEC, the only way to combat is to set up own mining pool...

This is the inevitable effect of adoption on a massive scale as what Bitcoin is experiencing. The other two examples of truly decentralized networks tor and torrent are no where near as popular and as used as Bitcoin or are on the decline in usage. People tend to go for easier to use alternatives, after-all, they do not consider centralization in their daily activities. Bitcoin does not have a real alternative, people want to use it, hold it and profit from it, but just not in the way it was designed to be.

Writing down your seedphrase, not being able to recover your sats if they are lost, checking the source codes of a software, running your own node and choosing your servers is not what a massive amount of the population are willing to do, but they are what create mass adoption.

I do not know what the solution will be of if there is one. The trends of closed and failed exchanges stealing people's money was not enough to scare others from centralized exchanges, cause they want to trust something. The exchanges can come up with "SAFU" and everyone relaxes again or were never alarmed at all.

Best case scenario will be to double down on privacy for those interested in it. Filtering fully open source softwares from partial ones and identifying platforms which are not as decentralized as they claim to be.

- Jay -