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by Closi 1634 days ago
It was satire and take your point on gas fees (I thought eth gas fees sounded funnier than ownership of hash compute share), but the general point is that consensus in blockchains is really controlled by the richest participants (i.e. who can own and run the largest mining rigs and have the highest hash rate) rather than consensus being equal across all participants or held by experts.

The power of your consensus 'vote' is proportional to how rich you are (i.e. how much mine power you have), rather than one-person-one-vote.
2 comments
capableweb 1634 days ago
> consensus in blockchains is really controlled by the richest participants

I think that remains to be seen. Bitcoin miners have tried to show their "control" over the network by forking the chain (see Bitcoin Cash and other forks) while Bitcoin mainline remained the leader. Ethereum is moving towards PoS even though current miners obviously don't want that. If successful, I think Ethereum will prove the opposite, the network is indeed controlled by it's participants and experts/developers, and not by the miners.

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Closi 1634 days ago
Moving to PoS is still control according to the richest participants - it's just changing the metric from how you measure wealth from 'hash power' to 'amount of eth owned'.
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thebean11 1634 days ago
By some measure of “control” I guess. The BCash example is still valid for proof of stake, no matter how rich the miners are users still need to assign the forked chain value.
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landemva 1634 days ago
One person one vote got us the current mess of bad choices in federal Senate elections. The choices suck and are effectively controlled by insider power brokers and lobbyists.

Between direct election of Senate and creation of third central bank, 1913 was a really bad year. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing...

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