Bitcoin Forum

We all know ethereum merge of PoW to PoS happened recently which reduced the transaction fee a lot but it become more centralized than before so what is going to be the future of ethereum?

Today I saw some blogs related to this so just curious about what bitcointalk community thinks about this merge, the major stake holders of ethereum becomes centralized exchanges which all consists of 64% and all the centralized exchanges are regulated and can be controlled by government so in future if governments make changes in their regulation policies which can affect the ethereum so what will be the future plan of ethereum holders? It can be trusted and still it is good for investment?

For investment maybe yes. Even with this side reasons of ethereum many people are into using centralized exchange. Plus having to accumulate eth is by setting up node and not into mining anymore. Holders of eth might probably thinking of this but with the current situation of hacks and some stolen funds. These investors are also inline to keep it away from those guys.

The only thing I dont like is the linkage on government since they might use this to use on their personal interest.

I never seen any statement if new update was also increasing the scalability. It seems like that decrease of tx fees in ethereum blockchain caused by the demand was going down. So many people have been migrating to layer 1 and 2 blockchain. I think that scalability problem never got solved.
Did i miss something?

I can assume those ethereum in centralized exchange sites have owned by their users. If they are withdrawing their ethereum and it would not be 64% of ethereum owned by cex. The government didn't need to give even more strict regulation. Government was focusing in AML and taxation.
I see no problem for ethereum for sure. It's still good as investment and why not? the price is jumping a bit last days due to the bitcoin small pump.

Although, I also see the ethereum fee has decreased, but I think it is because of the price drop and the transaction in the market is not too congested, so the gas fee has decreased a lot, not because of the upgrade.

Recently, Vitalik Buterin also announced further updates of ETH to fix the remaining issues and he also mentioned that he will solve the ETH centralization problem that people are concerned about. What he said, I don't know if it's possible with a model like POS, but if you are an investor who doesn't care about privacy only cares about profit, then you can still invest in ETH. I still believe that ETH will remain the king of altcoins and continue to grow in the future.

   - The only thing I can say about Ethereum right now because of that merger is that the transaction fee in ERC20 is going down somehow, unlike when that merger didn't happen yet. So at least I can say that it has helped ETH holders who often conduct transactions in ETH.

Now, regarding whether it is centralized, I think that if there is nothing wrong with it, our assets will be even safer when centralized because it will be more difficult for hackers to find a way to enter the platforms which is centralized. Rather than decentralized that is closer to the risk of being hacked by exploitative hackers.

It still can be trusted, knowing that many people have tried and done their projects on the ETH network and have succeeded, and they will likely continue to use that as their main blockchain to build on, and I don't think they are going anywhere. Checking on how it becomes in the future could be a great thing unless there's a game-changer token that would be better than it, and so far, ETH is still in the lead, IMO. As long as you will use it, I don't know why you would be worried in the first place because it will not affect us as users.

Merge reduced the fee problem which exists for years in ethereum blockchain but what about the future and how suddenly we start to trust the centralized ones?

Because the reason for the evolution of cryptocurrencies mainly due to the decentralisation and it can't be controlled by government at any cost if its proof of work but with proof of stake and the stake holders are very few in major I am really concerned about the future.

The only reason why Bitcoin is still decentralized is because Satoshi is not known and also the existence of other blockchain what makes Bitcoin doesn't improved its TPS. Centralization is crucial part of Ethereum to boost its performance, There is a pros and cons but that doesn't they are not trusted anymore because all transactions is still recorded in the blockchain and regulators is already watching on it so it's not dangerous as it sounds compared before that everything in crypto is not being watch by regulators.

Ethereum just did the dirty job for Bitcoin on handling larger tps by sacrificing it decentralized feature.

Ethereum is still most trusted chain that is widely used and the Ethereum platform has a huge number of successful projects whose main chain is the Ethereum network, so Ethereum must be trustworthy even though it is centralized, it does not matter much. even after Bitcoin is the position of Ethereum.  And the Ethereum platform has been more successful than any other platform. Which is very attractive to all those potential investors

Vitalik Buterin's decision to move Ethereum from PoW to PoS has its benefits which includes - greener environment as well as low transaction fees. However, the move has made Ethereum to become centralized which makes it less secure as it is no longer PoW. I think the choice is  ours to make, however, for those that cherish the former Ethereum's PoW, a group of miners and other crypto personalities now supports ETHW, which is Pow. Just like every other thing in life, we have to make our choices. Personally, I appreciate Ethereum's low gas fees now.

I don’t think you can ever fully trust an altcoin will stand the test of time. Bitcoin is the only truly trustworthy crypto asset. Alts can make you huge money but get in & get out. Never leave too much of your net worth in a lone alt, it’s asking for trouble. I mostly use them to just get more bitcoin.

Being centralized doesn't mean we cannot trust a project.  Remember exchanges like Binance, Kucoin, Coinbase exchange and others are centralized but yet we still trust them with our funds.  I believe Buterin and other ETH developers had proven their reputation.  As of investment, I don't think ETH is as good investment as those potential new projects in terms of profit.  So if you ask me, I'd rather invest my money somewhere that can give me a higher percentage of profit.


True but among altcoins Eth has a large user base, a stable flow of demand, and a good daily volume though not as high as Bitcoin, so I think you can rest easy if you invest your money in ETH in a sense that you will be able to convert it back to fiat currency any time you like.

The Eth Switch was basically a 51% attack. There is no other way to say it. Once it became POS, the network went centralized and under total regulatory scrutiny. For these reasons, it is not a trustable network anymore, but when it comes to investment, there is still a lot of potential on it.

Don't you care about the fact that all major networks have long been centralized? Don't you care about the fact that many decentralized protocols have a majority of voices centered on one or more addresses? There is no decentralization in altcoins. Numerous examples and facts have long and successfully proven this. Ethereum simply adjusts to the current realities of the crypto market, nothing more. All popular cryptocurrencies have become subject to censorship and control, even bitcoin. Trust such cryptocurrencies? Do you really have a choice? All of the major cryptocurrencies at the top are centralized and censored.

Nope, what's the reason I need to choose Ethereum if it's centralized since banks also centralized? I don't trust banks at all, this will be same as I don't trust any centralization in cryptocurrency.

It's you and the others, not me. I don't use any centralized exchange anymore, if you hold your coins on centralized exchange, it's a dumb decision. How you can sure those centralized exchange wouldn't get hacked in the future? there's a long list exchange got hacked since 2011 [1], not your keys not your coins.

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[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5090869.0

Ethereum transaction fees dropped because of the upgrade and not because of any drop in market price. We know what it used to be when Ethereum was less than $500 and how the fee was crazy. Even when projects, both old and new, started moving to the Binance Smartchain contract, Ethereum fee still remained high and was killing it gradually until this upgrade happened. If only you have an idea of how many projects that abandoned ERC because of that fee problem.

My opinion if true Most likely it will overthrow the monetary system that allows users to make transactions in real time. It is also possible that some governments are monitoring the progress of this platform and understanding what the future holds. That's why the possibilities for Ethereum are endless.

I think it's better to wait and see this project permanently, as it will target a very large market and cover a lot of people in need.

Since its inception, ethereum has been centralized, like all other crypto projects (except bitcoin). Therefore, that at the time of POW, which is now at POS, nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of centralization. If you think about what will happen to this project in the future, then I think it's the same as with all centralized projects - sooner or later governments will find ways to influence them. And as is usually the case, when the government interferes with the functioning of any project, it doesn't benefit the project. I don't think that this will happen any time soon and you need to get rid of eth urgently if you have it. No, on the contrary, ethereum may still be a profitable investment vehicle, as it was for many years before, but I think that you need to keep an eye on changes in the crypto market in order to always be ready for unpleasant surprises. In general, as with any investment.

Actually, I haven't heard ethereum developers say that upgrading to POS will help reduce gas fees but they have emphasized that gas fees will decrease after sharding upgrade is updated. If you say so, the gas fee will drop even more in the future when the next upgrades are updated. Although a lot of projects chose BSC over ETH if you look at the top projects, large projects still chose ETH at that time because it was decentralized and more secure than BSC. But now everything has changed.

Ethereum may be turning centralized, but other coins are faring worse (with the exception of Bitcoin). I believe that what's happening now is only temporary, since "The Merge" is in its very beginnings (it's only been around 2 months since the upgrade materialized on the ETH blockchain). Give it some time, and you'll see more validators hop in. I think with the upcoming scaling upgrade (which will integrate Sharding into the ETH blockchain), the network's centralization problems will come to an end.

I'm hopeful that will be the case for the good of "De-Fi". It would be quite disappointing to see ETH turning centralized, after being the pioneer of Web 3.0. After all, ETH always promised to be the platform for "unstoppable applications". That could only be a achieved with a decentralized and censorship-resistant blockchain. Many competitors come and go, but I believe ETH will last thanks to the solid foundation built upon it. The future is unpredictable, so we can only hope for the best. Just my opinion :)

You repeated it. But you are wrong. The Merge did not reduce the transaction fee. That upgrade has nothing to do with its fee problem which has been existent for a long time. Ethereum transactions today remain expensive. It is as expensive as before the Merge. Ethereum has yet to address this big and persisting problem.

About its centralization, wasn't it already centralized before the Merge? But Ethereum as an investment isn't really competing against Bitcoin. It is competing against equally centralized altcoins like XRP, BNB, etc. And it seems it is the best one among the bad ones. So if you plan to invest in altcoins, Ethereum remains to be a perfect choice.

If you only care about the performance of ethereum then it is true that it is not much of a problem that ethereum is centralized, as we have a lot of coins that are the same and people still decide to invest in them even if such coins go against everything that this market should stand for, however if you care about the ideals that inspired the creation of bitcoin and this market then this is worrying as there are very few coins which are actually decentralized, and it can be argued that now most of the market cap and volume is moving in those centralized coins.

Depends on the situation because this time crypto industry is not the same as before and we might have that probability if they decide to do so but I don't think they can do that with Ethereum because this is the second known cryptocurrency and when they do that, I'm sure it will not be the same anymore and people won't ever trust centralized coins anymore. If you want to invest in ETH you always do so but this time you need to be extra careful you might gonna lose the opportunity right now if you think of it that way because after all, we are here to take risks in our own way and I'm sure, it will be not easy from now after they migrated.

The Merge was never about reducing network fees or improving transaction confirmation times. It was all about reducing carbon emissions, effectively resulting in a 99.9% energy-efficient blockchain network. Subsequent network upgrades will target ETH's scaling issues more thoroughly. While the initial phase of The Merge resulted in heavy centralization, things are bound to improve for the better as Vitalik planned some fixes to help address the problem. He said there will be some upgrades that will help tackle the MEV issue to reduce the chance of censorship on the blockchain. There's no designated timeframe for this, but at least we know ETH won't stay centralized forever.

Compared to other chains, I think ETH is still the best option out there after Bitcoin. It's still going strong as the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap despite centralization issues. I'd trust ETH more than BNB, Solana, or XRP which are heavily-centralized "shitcoins". Who knows how far ETH will go? Just my opinion :)

The merge happened last months ago not recently but the transaction fee really have reduced? I didn't expect it but what I heard last time is that people said the fee is still the same. Oh well, maybe the effects is just delayed and now it is being applied. Let see if the fees are still going to be small once we get out of the dip we are experiencing now.

Eth is already centralized even before so people are not really bothered about its current state but despite that, many believes that the future of eth is still going to be bright because it already done some contributions in the past and it was like btc. It's the mother of all altcoins so it's hard for it to be disregarded.

Most of the users were not aware of what Ethereum is a centralized network. Its decisions can be manipulated or subject to influence. People kept using Ethereum because it was backed by miners who contributed to the increase in the value of the token.
The idea of smart contracts was really revolutionary considering the number of cryptocurrencies today. Most of these coins would not exist without Ethereum. Maybe we shouldn't trust this network or any other network, but it seems we don't have much of a choice.

I trusted Ethereum for a long time and it never changes even though it change to PoS. I have never seen a problem about it. In fact, as we can see nothing huge change happened, it was just the price but this won't bother me as I know that situation is not good. But of course, it can be changed once there is something wrong happen with the Ethereum platform and that is so easy to perform. But for now, the support is still strong and many investors/traders believe that this project remains trusted.

It's up to you, if you don't care about privacy issues then you can count on it. I trust and invest in ethereum for the profit it brings, so I won't see anything wrong with ethereum. The move to ethereum's POS is a must because there is no way to solve its problems like gas fees and scalability if it doesn't move to POS and can't reduce gas fees, I think people will also leave it soon and choose other blockchains. So it doesn't matter whether it becomes more centralized or not.

Honestly, people investing in cryptocurrencies today are more concerned with profits than privacy. If you want anonymity we have bitcoin, even if eth is decentralized it cant compete with bitcoin.

For a long time now the only thing that most people care about is nothing else but the profits they can get, and in a way it is disappointing especially if we take into account that this market was created with the idea of giving back the power of creating money to the people, and yet it seems that they are wiling to make any kind of sacrifice as long as they can get the convenience they are looking for and they can earn some money out of this market, but at the same time it is not that surprising otherwise things would have never gotten to this point in the first place.

In today's market, with the exception of bitcoins and non-custodial wallets, as far as I can tell, all the rest we are using are centralized, from exchanges to altcoins...it's all centralized and we don't seem to care about privacy anymore, we care more about profit. If you need a privacy priority coin we have bitcoin and I think bitcoin alone is enough for us to use. As for ethereum or other altcoins that are just tools to make profits, you don't need to worry about whether they are centralized or decentralized. As long as they are profitable for us, we just need to invest and convert them all to bitcoin on the DEX, we are safe.

Don't get your point, if something is getting centralized then it is controllable so for an average joe the chances of making profits will become less cause manipulators know when to trigger the button which pours profits in their pockets.

Bitcoin is not really anonymous but its completely decentralized so there is a difference between anonymity and authority. If we actually wanted the privacy then monero might be the king but it isn't the case.

If the centralization of Ethereum brings many benefits to many people I don't matter even though they have to get rid of their crypto characteristics, but crypto still has to grow with whatever it is. If decentralization is difficult in the future, perhaps centralization is a way to get the blessing of the government.

If it's about manipulation, I still believe that the crypto market is being manipulated even with bitcoin and not just with centralized altcoins. If we compare bitcoin to gold or stocks, bitcoin is too young, its capitalization is too small and it is not regulated by any legal authority, so the manipulation will never stop. The market is so vulnerable, even a few tweets from Elon caused an immediate reaction from bitcoin or the market. So whether concentrated or not, they are still manipulated, making prices to profit from big forces.

Yes, I agree with you, bitcoin is not really anonymous, it is just decentralized and I think that is enough for us to avoid government control and tracking. Anonymous coins like XMR although very well anonymous but not decentralized like bitcoin and they are being targeted by the government, they are too risky.

cryptos that survive in decentralization are very difficult to rise they become a huge obstacle for government regulation to develop. It is possible that Ethereum has the intention to embrace regulation but it is possible that in the future it will return to decentralization again, this seems strange but crypto is indeed very difficult now.

Firstly, I'm gonna reiterate that The Merge does not makes transaction fee cheaper since you seems didn't fully comprehend it, in fact the statement is already addressed as misconceptions(https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/#misconceptions).


Either centralization or decentralization is causing control, the difference is the consensus, centralization will limitate the control only to a hand in view, and the opposite gives broader control on each own.  Although it is very highly likely probable, centralization won't merely make causality of manipulation. The simple way for the concerned Ethereum holders in regard to centralization is to simply rethink their holding/investment position on ETH.

But the saying of centralization will market manipulators to have more control is baseless.

For the record you can check the current gas fee of ethereum here : https://etherscan.io/gastracker

It was around 25x higher few months back and if you say this is normal at the time of bull run but even after the end of bull run the uniswap transfer was around 50 dollar but now its around 2.5 and transaction fee for ethereum is less than 50 cents.

Validators are the one who will be controlling the blocks in PoS right so if most of the stake holders are centralized exchanges which are regulated by government or atleast someone who is running behind it may wants to take control of it so its easier with pos than PoW that is what my statement is about manipulation.

Let me make it clear, as you have stated:


According to you, The Merge result does affect into transaction fee. That is not technically the case, based on the link I already referred to, The Merge has no intended effect that correlates with the transaction fee. Here I quote it to make it clearer:


And the network condition between the bull run and the present is also addressed in the quote above.


I get what you meant, nevertheless, what I'm trying to say is that market manipulation may exists due to centralized entities that can't be separated from the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In a completely decentralized manner of Bitcoin, it is still in effect on the whole market.

I see no problem investing in ETH to be honest, ETH is still in the lead, IMO. As long as you will use it, I don't know why you would be worried in the first place because it will not affect us as users.

Same here, ETH market is pretty solid and it has liquidity.  We don't need to be seriously attached to a cryptocurrency so whether it is centralized or not, as long as it will give us profit, why not take the opportunity to earn from it.  Meaning, if we find the ETH market profitable, why not take advantage of it.  We are just buying it to sell in higher price anyway.

This is a very common problem of Proof-of-stake (POS) protocols, this is already proven with other networks, like Solana or Binance Smart Chain.
A lot of people also bash Ethereum becoming Proof-of-stake (POS) because of the centralization problem. Since they are saying that the solution of scalability is this Proof-of-stake (POS) but the decentralization is now the problem.

Most people view Ethereum as an investment tool (not a currency). They wouldn't care if it becomes heavily centralized as long as their pockets are filled with money. Only a very small minority actually care about decentralization, as they're true believers of the technology underpinning ETH. As long as money talks, don't expect things to get better anytime soon.

At least, Vitalik proposed a roadmap to help tackle the issues of centralization surrounding the Blockchain. I'm hopeful ETH will become more decentralized with subsequent network upgrades. Despite becoming less-decentralized with PoS, it's still a far better option than heavily centralized coins such as XRP, BNB, or Solana. I don't think ETH's position on the market will change just because it lost some decentralization after the upgrade. Who knows if it lives alongside BTC for generations? Just my opinion :)

If you only care about the profits what you say makes sense, but things are never that simple, just take a look at what it is happening with coins which were centralized like Luna and FTT, and even if ethereum has way more trust supporting it and it is nowhere near as vulnerable as those two tokens, the fact that it has become centralized means that it can be more easily manipulated and as such a collapse like that is not out of the question during the next decades, and if you are invested in ethereum at the time your losses could be very high.