[phire]

I'm fine with you dropping the principles of decentralization and accepting that the current situation is ok.

You can construct many great arguments that the increased centralization is a good thing, or that the upsides are better than the downsides.

What I take issue with is attempts to classify ethereum "Full Nodes" as more than what they are. Yes, they technically contain all the information requires to reconstruct an archival node (at least until statelessness becomes a thing).

They are simply not anywhere near the same thing, and attempts to brand them as the more or less same thing just comes across as denial.

[everfree]

> They are simply not anywhere near the same thing, and attempts to brand them as the more or less same thing just comes across as denial.

They are the same thing specifically when it comes to:

* Downloading, verifying, and storing every transaction that has ever happened on the network

* Maintaining a tamper-proof, data-complete copy of the blockchain

* Interacting with the blockchain in a maximally verified, maximally secure way

I never said that they were exactly the same thing or that they should be branded as the same thing, I said that they store the same data (by which I mean from an information-theoretic standpoint), which is true.

> What I take issue with is attempts to classify ethereum "Full Nodes" as more than what they are.

I take issue with the attempts to classify them as less than what they are.

What needs to be squashed is the common idea in the OP that "full nodes are not actually full" because there's a "fuller" "archive" node that has the states indexed on-disk. The difference between a full node and an archive node is perfomant historical queryability, not security or data-completeness.

OP says that "access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities", which is untrue because you don't need an archive node to access Ethereum, only a full node. OP's idea that an archive node is the only "true Ethereum full-node" is common baloney that pops up often in the cryptocurrency community.

[phire]

This is where the difference between theory and reality start to become an issue.

Yes, in theory the full node contains the full blockchain. Yes, it's all you need to verify that any transaction happened. Yes it's tamper proof.

But in reality, it can't show you the full side-effects of every transaction. In reality there are occasionally things things that require archival data. In reality, it's always easier to go to a centralised block explorer, or pay one of the few centralised API services (And I know this from experience, I've synced a full archival node back in 2019, and build a product that required querying it. It was such a pain that these days I'd highly recommend not doing that and just paying for API access)

In reality, the fact that you occationally need to go to etherscan to get the data you need, results in you just going to etherscan anyway, even for the simpler queries when you have a perfectly fine full node sitting there (again, personal experience). Hell, etherscan actually provides more data than an archival node, where else are you going to find the source code for contracts?

In reality... Most people don't even run light nodes. They certainly don't run full nodes. They just use etherscan, or whatever API their 3rd party wallet uses.

That's why in reality, access to ethereum is partially centralised around API providers. Yes, in theory anyone can go around them, set up their own node or create a competing API service at any time. But that's not what happens in reality, and when it comes to the topic of centralisation vs decentralisation, I'd argue that reality is far more important than theory.