Vitalik Buterin Critiques Ethereum’s Decentralization Compared to Bitcoin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has a detailed analysis of decentralization in Ethereum compared to Bitcoin and other networks. The issue of centralized mining and staking in blockchains has remained contentious as analysts view models shifting from the core. Buterin also addressed debates with the mainnet and layer 2 solutions. 

Vitalik Buterin Lauds Decentralization on Ethereum

He pointed out that Ethereum is in a better place than Bitcoin in terms of robustness and decentralization. Speaking at the ETHCC in Brussels, Vitalik Buterin noted that two mining pools account for 50% of the computing power of Bitcoin while four make up 75%. Drawing lines with Ethereum, he said that a large portion is unidentified which means they are operated by a group of individuals or independent stakers.

He added that The Lido portion comprises 37 different validators, making the overall system largely decentralized. This generally attracts benefits like a multi-client ecosystem, different users across jurisdictions, and a multi-center knowledge ecosystem. 

“There are Geth execution clients and non-Geth execution clients, and the proportion of non-Geth execution clients exceeds that of Geth execution clients. A similar situation also occurs in the consensus client system.”

Ethereum moved to a proof-of-stake consensus model after the much anticipated Merge. This essentially swapped miners with stakers reducing its energy use. However, while this method was tipped to aid the network, centralization claims were hammered by critics because of the 32 ETH benchmark. 

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Validators and Threshold: A tradeoff 

Vitalik Buterin highlighted the obstacle of the 32 ETH staking threshold explaining the tradeoff for a cheaper fee. Today, the network has about 1 million validators and if the minimum threshold lowers to 4 ETH, the network would have about 8 million validators and so on increasing the trade-off. 

“So, it’s a tradeoff. Ethereum has historically tried to be in the middle of that tradeoff. But if we can find any way to improve it, then we have extra stat points that we can choose to spend on reducing the minimum requirements, or on making it easier to run a node.”

In a related development, the Ethereum co-founder described blockchains as truth machines providing the same over messages. 

A blockchain is a “truth machine” in the specific sense that it provides consensus approximate-truth over when messages were sent. It doesn’t tell you “was the moon landing real?”.

This reduces the blockchain’s attack surface by a lot, but it does mean we need other tools to…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 20, 2024

At press time, ETH price is trading at $3,492, up more than 2% in the last 24 hours. The trading volume is flat over the last day as the market prepares for spot Ethereum ETF launch next week.

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