People always talk about the beach, all your worries disappear.
But this is not entirely true of researchers at the 2018 Financial Crypto 2018 conference this week in Curaçao, an island in the Caribbean, where they discussed two of the largest crypto-currency protocols, bit Money and Ethereum, and some of their shortcomings.
On March 2, researchers at the University College London published a new essay entitled “An egalitarian social or philanthropic government: Encrypting the State of Money Management” by measuring how many developers are involved and modifying Encrypted currency code library, which further in-depth study of this topic.
According to the paper, 7% of Bitcoin Core’s software is written by the same developer, and about 20% of the files are written by the same coder.
According to Sarah Azouvi, Ph.D., Ph.D. in computer science at the University College London, co-author of the dissertation, based on the research information above, Ethereum is more centralized than Bitcoin in this regard.
This is an interesting point because it involves the current fierce debate in the Ethereum community where the two sides are tit-for tat against the EIP 867.
EIP 867 seems to have made it easier by recovering lost funds through software changes – a controversial topic that dates back to the 2016 hacking of DAO, when Ethereum Of developers decided to reverse the transaction, so as to return the stolen funds to the victims.
However, while there are often many similar discussions on GitHub, the total number of related discussion users involved is less than what Azouvi and many others expect.
She told CoinDesk:
“There are still not many people involved, and most of them make some comments everywhere, and not many are critical discussions.”
Those decision makers
However, the debate over funding losses at Ethereum is not the only reason Culexo’s participants discussed the web. Another reason highlighted in this paper is management, as most of the major code changes in Ethereum were written by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin himself.
“He stands out from everyone,” Azouvi said.
This finding is not surprising, as it has been the focus of debate for some time, and many believe Buterin has too much power over the web in a blockchain known as truly decentralized.
Even Jason Teutsch, developer of TrueBit, an Ethereum expansion agreement, jokes that even when asked about management-related issues, Buterin can even handle everything. However, on a more serious issue, he believes that the recent debate has only shown how difficult blockchain management is under normal circumstances, and generally there is no way for everyone to be satisfied.
Teutsch told CoinDesk:
“It’s a hard question, it happens to every system that needs to be managed, and it’s always upset every time things change.”
Not so unusual
However, while the management of the blockchain seems to be more central than the decentralized projects expected of people, researchers at the University College London have pointed out that this is not unusual.
For example, Ethereum and Bitcoin have similar levels of engagement with other open source projects, such as the programming languages Clojure and Rust.
“Although the community is focused on decentralization, it’s no different and they all behave similarly,” she said.
In addition, the paper admits that “measuring the degree of centralization by looking at the code or looking at a particular source” is itself limited.
On this main line, IC3 researchers proposed during the conference that there are actually some technical ways to measure the degree of centralization of a cryptocurrency project.
In particular, they examined how often blocks travel across the network and how the nodes in the blockchain are geographically distributed. By identifying these two aspects, the researchers found that Ethereum’s performance is superior in both respects In bitcoin.
One listener added that from another perspective, the decentralization of the cryptocurrency economy, which is overlooked in the research of the conventions, is also an important factor.
Voting rights
However, as people become more interested in the decentralization of cryptocurrencies, one might think that the corresponding solutions are also being considered.
However, the participating researchers and developers were essentially neutral about the issues facing Ethernet Square and Bitcoin, saying they wanted to sidestep their stance on making decisions around the agreement.
“I do not want to have any position.” “I’m interested in technology solutions, but I will not favor either side,” especially when talking about the recent debate about Ethereum, Teutsch said, and he then pointed out a better vote Mechanisms are a way of settling disputes.
Azouvi seems to be ashamed of her position, saying: “We did not come up with a new system and we counted how many people were doing.”
Still, she goes on to echo Teutsch’s point of view: “Ethereum can benefit from having a more formal management model, but that’s hard to come by, even if you want a more formal decision Way, it is difficult to decide who should write, and then who should vote.
She suggested: “They can try to make sure everyone who can vote can vote.”
Despite this, Azouvi pointed out that voting opened up a whole new way:
“Voting is a problem in itself, but it makes sense.”