Is Ethereum not as decentralized as it likes to be?
As many of you may already know, Ethereum (ETH) will change from PoW testing to PoS, which is also called Ethereum 2.0. The PoS is a staking procedure that allows you to run a node server when holding more than 32 ETH. By changing from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, the open-source project Ethereum hopes to achieve faster and cheaper transactions.
The criticism is that only those who have enough ETH hodl'n. At the present time (19 July 2020) this is a value of about US $ 7500. This is a considerable contribution and unattainable for some private individuals. The question quickly arises whether this will not lead to the formation of lumps and the PoW will then be determined by only a few players, or is there something to be said against it?
According to the Cointelegraph, almost 80% of all ether assets are large enough to participate in the staking process for ETH 2.0. This means that most of the ETH holding could also run their own ETH 2.0 staking server. But even now it is relatively expensive to mine ETH, i.e. to run a PoW node server. The hardware, power and maintenance costs of such a server in a Central European or North American country are already too expensive. The expenses exceed the income from the mining. This means that the change from PoW to PoS testing does not change much from the division of the mining servers, since both require a high initial financial outlay.
Due to the possibility that about 80% of all ETH Hodler can afford a PoS server, there is nothing to prevent a democratic division of the ETH 2.0 PoS servers. You can't define your miners of trust by delegation, as you can do here on Hive, but you can join mining pools, or rather community-staking pools, and thus help to determine the direction of the journey. Because the miners determine which features or even forks are used by using their software and its updates. If the majority of nodes support a feature, then this is considered consensus and the network is based on it.
However, one must not close one's eyes to possible risk for the network. Staking also means that these min. 32 ETH are frozen, this also applies to the ethers in community staking. It is also possible that ETH gets "lost" because users lose their Withdraw key or even get stolen by their operators. Another danger is that the whole complexity of ETH 2.0 and its decentralized nature. Security holes can open up, of which, despite all the seriousness of the development, only come to light later. Of course there is also a financial aspect that can make Ethereum insecure, but this is again a separate article.
How do you see this and do you trust Ethereum or is another blockchain solution and cryptocurrency more your thing? Are you more the Hodlers or do you actively use ETH DApps, maybe even for financing or even for capital increase through DeFi's? Write this in the comments.
(First published in German)