The chink in the armor: traces of centralization

[Ambatman]

I do not know what the solution will be of if there is one. The trends of closed and failed exchanges stealing people's money was not enough to scare others from centralized exchanges, cause they want to trust something. The exchanges can come up with "SAFU" and everyone relaxes again or were never alarmed at all.

Understanding the problem is a first start
Before a Doctor starts treatment, Diagnosis are taken after finding the problem
Solution starts coming in.
Centralization has already sipped into the bone of civilization and decentralization is seen as a form of anarchy.
The sad thing is not many are interested in privacy or freedom
Many selling their data in form of KYC for some tokens.
If it would be possible to create a decentralized exchange where changes can be made by majority vote and there would exist equality no matter how many of a coin an individual have
Everybody would be entitled to a vote as long as they hold a stake in the exchange.
The notion that the amount or how powerful a body is the more the control is one thing that's fighting against decentralization and I believe that's one issue with mining pool of Bitcoin.
Back to my hypothetical exchange 
It would serve more like a market in introducing interested buyers and sellers anonymously and maybe a code or AI to serve as escrow by only allowing a connection if a user have said amount( to prevent fraud) in their wallet via explorer.
Or better still something of similarity with monero.
Well me speaking jargons
Know nothing about coding.

[pooya87]

I guess the question is what we mean by eradication.

Depending on the case it could mean removal of the traces of centralization as much as possible (eg. in case of mining pools) and in other cases it could mean inventing alternatives (eg. in case of CEX we should offer a truly decentralized exchange, in case of server-dependent SPV wallets we should offer more decentralized SPV clients).

Mining pools can be moved outside the United States, but it is still possible to establish a legislative framework between several countries and it is easy to know where mining is located.

Mining (actual hashrate) and mining pools need to be spread around the globe specially in independent countries as much as possible. They should remain in US as much as they should have remained in China and as much as they should be created in other countries like El Salvador.

That's how we achieve true decentralization. In a peer-to-peer network, we can not eliminate malicious "peers", we just populate the network with enough "honest peers" that the malicious one doesn't affect anything.
That's the same with pools, we don't need to remove a malicious pools but we should make them ineffective. For example the reason why the malicious MARA pool is not a serious threat is because it has ~3-4% of the hashrate. But there are other pools with higher hashrate and some are located inside same jurisdiction...

[NotATether]

I do not know what the solution will be of if there is one. The trends of closed and failed exchanges stealing people's money was not enough to scare others from centralized exchanges, cause they want to trust something. The exchanges can come up with "SAFU" and everyone relaxes again or were never alarmed at all.

How come I or some other random person can say "SAFU" and nobody listens, but some giant scheming exchange without your best interests in mind can say it and everyone believes them and calms down?

Ever thought of that?

[un_rank]

...Ever thought of that?

I do not know the context you or anyone else has said it, but for the big, scheming exchanges, people listen cause they want to trust something. The exchanges do not even need to try, but they do with SAFU and when they (coinbase) tried to create what they were calling a non custodian wallet, though it was very far from that.

- Jay -

[Z390]

• There are similarly server dependent DEXes that suffer from the same flaw just because the developer of that DEX wanted to make money (through fees) not develop something decentralized to solve a problem!

I think this issue lies at the heart of the problem: Creating a truly decentralized system is hard, and doesn't pay. At least not in the way a system with traces of centralization does. And most users don't care that much about decentralization anyway, so the financial incentive of merely pretending to be decentralized is incredibly high.

As Z390 said, we got really lucky with satoshi's sacrifice. And I'm not sure we'll have a "second coming", now that it's clear that there's a lot of money to be made.

Bitcoin was financially worthless with Satoshi had created it, there was only the incentive of decentralization.

The only problem is, Satoshi had the heart to be anonymous, and i'm not sure we can find another character like that, since most of us who are posting here or elsewhere in Bitcoinsphere have already blown their covers.

Blown cover in what way? Or does this have anything to do with wallet addresses that have been shared on this forum already? I don't think that should blown anyone's cover still, I read that Nakamoto had an account on this forum and I became active after a while, so anyone can still do what nakamoto did and have an account on here then go into hiding if they believe in what they created.

[Z390]

I do not know what the solution will be of if there is one. The trends of closed and failed exchanges stealing people's money was not enough to scare others from centralized exchanges, cause they want to trust something. The exchanges can come up with "SAFU" and everyone relaxes again or were never alarmed at all.

How come I or some other random person can say "SAFU" and nobody listens, but some giant scheming exchange without your best interests in mind can say it and everyone believes them and calms down?

Ever thought of that?

The problem starts right from the beginning, it shows how people just jump into anything without full understanding of the innovation, Bitcoin want meant to be used far away from any platforms that are centralized.

If this was respected everyone will be trading Bitcoin via P2P only or decebtralized exchanges, lack of understanding the necessity of Decentralisation is why people carried Bitcoin into the hands of a centralized exchange, they are using it wrongly.

And many people don't even care.

[pinggoki]

The problem with that really good solution is that there's bound to be a resistance happening when the patching on those chink on the armor, take for example, bitcoin.org, I don't think that the owner of that website would want to relinquish control of such a good website right? If there's a way that we can prevent profit loss or interest removal from the people that's bound to get hit with the repairs of those vulnerability, we would probably see that it's going to be easy to do all of it without any hitch, but the compromises are going to be difficult to fathom for anyone of us, this deserves some sort of consortium or summit.

[Reatim]

I know its not easy but by now we should have this done already, instead, both old and upcoming developers are running after money since crypto space is the new gold rush, no one wants to make real sacrifice like Nakamoto did.

This is the reason why Bitcoin is different from all other crypto coins out there, no one is ready to make sacrifices without wanting something back, without their names be heard and them available to take the credits, of cos, the centralized entities will crawl in. Shame.

Bitcoin was very unique because it was the first of its own. Satoshi’s unique idea gave way for others to base their works on his work and try to replicate it. For example, facebook became insanely popular because it was a new concept and no one’s ever heard of it before. But now many have created their own social medias and it’s hard to breakthrough and make something unique.

I think people’s need for clout and attention is what prevents them from doing what Satoshi did. Knowing what bitcoin is and what bitcoin could be, they now want to have that. Do you think satoshi expected for bitcoin to reach these heights?

[davis196]

The only viable solution is to patch the chink in the armor! To eradicate as many traces of centralization as we can. After all we should remove the attack vector not try to defend against the attack

That sounds great, but can you really stop the people from using centralized exchanges and centralized altcoins? I don't think so.
Can you really make BTC mining more decentralized by redistributing the hash power among a bigger pool of smaller miners? I don't think so.
It's cool to play the role of a "decentralization maximalist", but most things that you want to change are almost impossible to be changed, because there won't be any consensus among the crypto community. The people are free to use whatever crypto services they want(at their own risk).

[NotATether]

The only viable solution is to patch the chink in the armor! To eradicate as many traces of centralization as we can. After all we should remove the attack vector not try to defend against the attack

That sounds great, but can you really stop the people from using centralized exchanges and centralized altcoins? I don't think so.
Can you really make BTC mining more decentralized by redistributing the hash power among a bigger pool of smaller miners? I don't think so.
It's cool to play the role of a "decentralization maximalist", but most things that you want to change are almost impossible to be changed, because there won't be any consensus among the crypto community. The people are free to use whatever crypto services they want(at their own risk).

You cannot repair the chinks in the armor without using lower-quality mail!
*I am no blacksmith however, so I might be wrong.

The best option is to just forge a new armor. With plate mail or something. In the metaphor with cryptocurrency that would be to make a privacy coin.

Fortunately for us, this has already been done. It is called Monero.

No, I am not shilling for Monero. Just pointing out that it exists. And it is apparently immune to legislation and cannot be weakened by it.

I see BTC <=> XMR atomic swaps becoming a thing.