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Vitalik Buterin Denies Ethereum Centralization Claims, Here’s Everything

Published

3 months ago

July 27, 2024

Coin2049 Newsletter

Vitalik Buterin has stepped forward to address concerns about the project’s commitment to decentralization. The controversy began when Péter Szilágyi, a prominent figure in their development team, publicly expressed worries about the direction of Ethereum’s research and development efforts.

Vitalik Buterin Refutes Péter’s Assertion

Vitalik Buterin has firmly rejected claims that the research team is accepting centralization. His statement comes in response to concerns raised by Péter Szilágyi, head of the Ethereum team, about the direction of their development. Buterin, who recently attended a Foundation research workshop, emphasized that multiple discussions focused on minimizing centralization.

Vitalik outlined several areas of focus from the workshop, including analysis of multiple proposers to potentially eliminate the builder role, maximizing the power of inclusion lists, and ideas about fork selection based on transaction inclusiveness. He also mentioned efforts to accelerate the deployment of the Orbit mechanism, which could significantly reduce the minimum deposit size for staking.

The controversy arose when Szilágyi expressed concerns about the proposed PeerDAS upgrade, which would increase the Ethereum blob size to 32 MB. He argued that this change could hinder home stakers from participating in the network, potentially compromising decentralization. Szilágyi’s comments on social media suggested that researchers were “murdering” home stakers and that the research team had accepted the idea of centralizing everything as long as it could be verified.

Buterin’s response aims to reassure the community that decentralization remains a core focus of the project’s development efforts. This exchange highlights the ongoing debates within the ETH ecosystem about balancing technological advancements with the fundamental principle of decentralization.

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Ethereum’s Decentralization Compared to Other Networks

In a broader context, Vitalik Buterin has previously provided a detailed analysis of decentralization in Ethereum compared to Bitcoin and other networks. Speaking at ETHCC in Brussels, he pointed out that ETH is in a better position than Bitcoin in terms of robustness and decentralization.

He noted that while two mining pools account for 50% of Bitcoin’s computing power and four make up 75%, a large portion of ETH’s network is operated by unidentified individuals or independent stakers. This comparison shows ETH’s ongoing commitment to maintaining a decentralized network structure as it continues to evolve.

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