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:<p><a href="https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e" rel="nofollow">https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...</a><p>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.
For some further context, Ethereum allows miners to vote on block capacity increases in a way similar to that which some people wanted to add to Bitcoin. Apparently it's recently started acting like a live demonstration of the reasons why the Bitcoin developers didn't consider this a good idea: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7pfshh/why_is_8m_gas_causing_so_many_uncles/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7pfshh/why_is_8m_...</a>
As a piece of anecdata: I run a Bitcoin node at home with no troubles, but I've been totally unable to sync the Ethereum chain. Trying to do so drags my computer to its knees for hours and doesn't seem to be making very much progress.
There is hidden centralization of dev teams and clients in both projects.<p>Bitcoin core could probably be sunk by covert US government or mafia-esque intervention with the dev team.<p>Both bitcoin core and ethereum are monocultures, which makes them much more vulnerable to black swan bugs.
I have been running multiple bitcoin and altcoin nodes and still I am not able to run public geth node synced for month on dedicated server (4c SAS disks). So if "Bitcoin Underutilizes Its Network" then Ethereum is actively destroying itself.
this race for the lowest block time is completely madness! what is the use of having one confirmation if the block could go orphan and your transaction could be reversed, it's like a placebo efect.
The complaint about Ethereum's uncle rate seems a bit off base, since unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum's uncles aren't wasted; they contribute to its accumulated hash count, play a part in fork selection, and reward the miners who make them.
<i>"...a Byzantine quorum system with 20 nodes would be more decentralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum with significantly fewer resource costs. Of course, the design of a quorum protocol that provides open participation, while fairly selecting 20 nodes to sequence transactions, is non-trivial."</i><p>That's exactly what the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) is: <a href="https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...</a><p>(Full disclosure: I work at Stellar)
Crypto has created the first large division I've seen in the software development community. "Open" has been a way to describe how money is not necessary except when you need it but never do if you have rich parents or are catering to old school investors. Crypto provides the first a way for things to be truly Open.
the big elephant in the room is that Bitcoin and Ethereum networks have good latency because the guy in rural Africa simply doesn't mine because he as no chance of making money, if people in remote regions with very bad connections entered the game the propagation time to 95% of the network would go to 60s or more.
A thought in the light of Spectre and meltdown, if we look at distributed computing as an ooo execution, couldn’t one trick someone to act, and therefore spill information about something they really shouldn’t or normally wouldn’t done, because of the “fake” branch being revoked?