Six Misunderstandings of Ethereum: Is decentralization really omnipotent?

Editor's Note: This article comes fromFirst class warehouse blockchain research institute (ID: first_vip1)Editor's Note: This article comes from

First class warehouse blockchain research institute (ID: first_vip1)

, Author: Jeffrey Hancock, translation: First Class Warehouse (First.VIP)_Saline, reprinted with authorization by Odaily.

Amidst the hype surrounding the blockchain and its potential use cases, rumors abound about Ethereum's "decentralization." This article aims to uncover the reality beneath the hype.

Ethereum is actually more fragile than we think. Here are six myths about the second-largest cryptocurrency.

Ethereum is more decentralized than Bitcoin, there is no doubt about it. This was also demonstrated in a previous study published by Professor Emin Gür Cyrer, which numerically revealed the respective degrees of decentralization of the two systems.

Over the past year, the crypto community and developers have asked the question about decentralization several times. Is unbreakable decentralization a myth or a reality? For ease of understanding, let's take a look at the creator of Ethereum and its concept of decentralization.

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Misconception 1: Decentralization is a distributed network

“Decentralization is one of the fundamental concepts of blockchain, and the vast majority of research and development is devoted to creating and improving it, but the exact meaning of the word is still in doubt.”

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(Picture a is a centralized network, picture b is a decentralized network, and picture c is a distributed network)

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• Myth #2: Blockchains are error-resistant

• Developers themselves are confused about the definition of decentralization, so what do we do? V God has its own classification criteria for this - the following three points can determine whether the network is centralized:

• Architectural decentralization: how many computers are in the network? And how many of those computers might not be able to make the system run stably?

Political decentralization: How many people or organizations control the computers that make up the system?

Logical decentralization: Is the data structure more like a whole or a relationship between individual objects? If you cut off half of the system (both suppliers and users), will it still work?

• Centralization of architecture often leads to centralization of politics, although this is avoidable in the computing community (but in terms of logical centralization, this makes it difficult to decentralize architecture and politics).

• Why decentralization is so important:

• Collusion with each other is more difficult. Participants in a decentralized system are less likely to collude with each other to jointly influence the development of the system.

Defend against attack. It is almost impossible for an attacker to bring down the entire system, but in a centralized network, attacking the central point is enough.

It all sounds as simple as it sounds. But at the protocol level, things are different again. If for some reason a large number of computer components failed at the same time, the fault tolerance of the blockchain itself would be useless.

V God gave a real-life example: If in a plane crash, four engines fail at the same time (of course this is impossible). But what if all four engines were assembled in the same factory by the same irresponsible worker? Then the entire shipment is defective, and all parts are likely to fail at the same time. The end result will be catastrophic.

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Misconception 3: The Ethereum network is resistant to various attacks

“We made a change to the mining process so that now, when a miner finds that it takes more than 5 seconds to mine a block, the x2 gas limit is automatically lowered. This allows for an automatic rebuild of the system, just like it does today .”

However, ironically, one year later, on October 4, 2017, the Ropsten test network suffered a new attack, and the purpose of this attack was only to test the new Byzantine update code, which could have been reduced by increasing the cost of gas fees. prevent such attacks.

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Misunderstanding 4: There is no mining pool conspiracy theory

For example, a mining pool operator can include only the transactions he needs in formed blocks. So for many mining pools, one of the goals of mining today is to ensure distributed block production.

Nearly 70% of the computing power in the network belongs to only a few large pools. This applies to almost any cryptocurrency, the complexity of which is beyond control, which means that it is no longer possible to generate any profit from independent mining. Therefore, mining pool owners are able to influence network policy.

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Myth #5: Only the owner of a crypto wallet has access to his funds

One of the characteristics of cryptocurrencies is that no one can use other people's funds for any transactions. In most tokenized systems, this is due to the following scheme: each transaction entity should be able to perform operations in a way that satisfies the requirements of previous transaction entities. This means that the private key must be in possession and avoids double transactions or theft.

While the technology has many advantages in terms of security and convenience, it also has subtle drawbacks. The holder of the digital wallet is not the full owner of the funds, and the funds are kept by contracts, which is contrary to the original principles of cryptocurrencies.

In theory, a running contract can perform any action without the user's permission. Of course, we can also use open source software such as blockchain browsers to check whether the operation of the contract is correct, but not everyone can do it. The solution to this problem is to create just one audit contract, but that's what we've done so far.

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Myth #6: The Ethereum network cannot be manipulated

At the end of 2017, the online game CryptoKitties accounted for more than 13% of the traffic of Ethereum, and was dubbed the "Ethereum Killer". The popularity of decentralized applications relies on simple and unique functions, such as allowing users to breed various virtual kittens. The more unique the offspring bred, the greater the reward for the owner. Since the characteristics are not fixed, every cat is unique.