There is growing criticism that Ethereum, the largest in the blockchain world, has become centralized. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to recent allegations of centralization of the ETH network.
Vitalik Buterin responds to criticism!
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has responded to recent claims by Ethereum team leader Péter Szilágyi regarding the alleged centralization of the Ethereum network “karalabe.eth”. In a post, Szilágyi claimed that PeerDAS is the direction Ethereum is headed with the next hard forks, aiming to increase blobs to a staggering 32MB, though not immediately. Szilágyi thinks Ethereum has “lost the plot” and claims that the research team “fully embraced the idea of centralizing everything as long as it can be verified.” To him, this is decentralized verification but a cute charade of centralized control.
Péter Szilágyi’s claims that “the research team fully embraces the idea of centralizing everything as long as it can be verified” caught the attention of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who stated that this is false. Buterin stressed that the Ethereum team is deeply engaged in discussions aimed at minimizing, not promoting, centralization.
Controversies about Ethereum and proposed solutions
Vitalik Buterin listed several key discussions and proposals aimed at minimizing centralization, including an in-depth analysis of the multi-proposer and determining whether the founder role can be eliminated. The Ethereum team also shared ideas for maximizing the power of opt-in lists (FOCIL) while making the choice of ‘hard fork’ dependent on transaction participation. Other proposals include an analysis of Orbit single slot finality (SSF) and thoughts on accelerating the deployment of the Orbit mechanism, which has the potential to reduce minimum deposit sizes by around ten times before single slot finality occurs. Meanwhile, SSF is still in the research phase.
It takes about 15 minutes to finalize an Ethereum block. However, research is underway to improve the efficiency with which Ethereum’s consensus mechanism validates blocks and significantly reduce the finalization time. Instead of waiting 15 minutes, blocks can be proposed and finalized in the same slot. This concept is called single slot finality (SSF). Other proposals Buterin highlighted in his post include distributed block generation for PeerDAS, network analysis and bandwidth optimization of PeerDAS and fullDAS, ways to more partially automate recovery from 51% attacks and rely less on the “social layer”, and ensuring that inclusion lists are fully applied to blobs and transactions abstracted to the local account (e.g. EIP-7560).
Vitalik Buterin defends ZK Proofs
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin highlights the potential of Zero Knowledge (ZK Proof) to improve social media platforms, especially on the privacy and scalability front. For perspective, ZK Proof is a cryptographic method that facilitates verification with limited data disclosure. As you have been following on Kriptokoin.com, this has been perceived as a game changer, especially in decentralized social protocols based on privacy and trust.
Speaking on the sidelines of ETHCC [7] Brussels, Buterin acknowledged that the potential of ZK Proofs is crucial to enable private content filtering. This technique empowers users to own their data and control third-party access. But the Ethereum co-founder also reiterated that beyond ZK Proof, social protocols need a unique front-end experience. Buterin mentioned Farcaster, which is similar to X, and Flink, which turns X into a Reddit-like platform. In this context, he noted:
I think the benefits of a more communal architecture and the decentralized social structure that makes that possible is something that I support.
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