Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

printers_rock t1_izaatrc wrote

The current state of crypto in general is opposite of its goals. Because the natural tendency of any complex system is to centralize, and here we are. 4 Mining pools control ~70% of bitcoin hashrate. Proof of Stake just codifies this inevitability for Ethereum.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Crypto is fucking DUMB.

7

prodoosh t1_izd46v1 wrote

But why does that matter? People with stake/work don’t have any additional control of the network. It’s still just as decentralized.

99% could be in one pool and it would be no different in terms of centralization

1

phreakwhensees t1_izaohye wrote

Bitcoin mining pools are not as much of a centralization point as you think they are. First of all, if a pool publishes an invalid block, the non-mining nodes in the network reject the block and it does not get propagated to the rest of the network and the pool never gets the block or the payouts. At most, a nefarious pool could censor transactions or publish empty blocks since those are technically valid blocks. At this point, it is obvious they are acting nefariously and miners can easily switch to another pool or solo mine in a matter of minutes.

Lastly, upgrades to the mining protocols such as Stratum v2 make it so that pools don’t even have the ability to do transaction selection. The only ability they have is to take a proposed block from a miner, publish it, and distribute the rewards.

https://stratumprotocol.org/

−2