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46% of ETH POS post merge is just two addresses

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Re: 46% of ETH POS post merge is just two addresses

#2
This will probably get lower over the next few days but it still doesn't look very distributed compared with the existing Banking system.

It's hard to tell the difference between ETH running on infrastructure maintained by Binance, Binance, and FTX etc and USD going between JPMorgan, Citi, and Goldman.

I read a statistic that over 50% of the Ethereum Mainnet is on AWS (but can't find it now) - hopefully that isn't all in the same Virginia data centre.

Re: 46% of ETH POS post merge is just two addresses

#4

This will probably get lower over the next few days but it still doesn't look very distributed compared with the existing Banking system. It's hard to tell the difference between ETH running on infrastructure maintained by Binance, Binance, and FTX etc and USD going between JPMorgan, Citi, and Goldman. I read a statistic that over 50% of the Ethereum Mainnet is on AWS (but can't find it now) - hopefully that isn't al…

https://twitter.com/solanobahn/status/1547604262527463424

Re: 46% of ETH POS post merge is just two addresses

#8
I tend towards the theory that POS is more centralizing than POW, and the question is will it stay decentralized or end up with one address (or rather one entity) controlling 50%?

With POW a miner needs to continually provide new investments to be competitive, with new and more effective hardware and electricity.

But with POS you can just keep your coins in one place, and it will keep building up with no new investments at all (except running a node, a relatively small cost).

And in POS if someone ever reaches 50%, then it can forever hold that position, and it's essentially game over (baring a drastic hard fork).

It doesn't seem that unlikely that one big exchange will accomplish it.

Re: 46% of ETH POS post merge is just two addresses

#9
post #5

Can someone explain what this means to us not in the loop?

When it comes to blockchains, it is considered good to have the "work" be spread across a wide number of parties. The goal is to have decentralized consensus. If any one entity, or a small number of entities, gain a significant share of either the mining hash-rate, or the staking pools, then there is a possibility of something called a 51% attack. While the two institutions from the tweet are unlikely to perform such an attack, their significant share of ETH raises questions about how decentralized the platform truly is. One such question that arises is, can the US Government impose restrictions on these pools so that transactions involving sanctioned addresses are not included?
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