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Is Cloudflare Ethereum's largest centralization point?
1 points by sebscholl 870 days ago
I've recently started learning about blockchain. While I understand how "anyone" can spin up a node on chains like Ethereum, that kind of decentralization feels somewhat meaningless if all (or 99.99%) network calls get relayed through several mainnet endpoints. Because of that, who owns (has the username and password) the mainnet domains, like cloudflare-eth.com and can manage their DNS records? Is this not the largest point of centralization, as well as an (or several) account owner who could take down most Dapps and network activity with a single DNS update?
1 comments
latchkey 870 days ago
Cloudflare, in general, is a massive centralization point for the entire internet. Picking a technology here and there and worrying about the amount of centralization, isn't that meaningful.

Here is another good one for you to ponder since you're new with blockchain... most bitcoin mining pools sit behind CF too. It doesn't mean that bitcoin is centralized though.

The reality of the situation is that while yes... there are a lot of dependencies on CF, that is not the same as centralization. The dependencies could change and give up what CF offers, or they could just route around CF to other similar services. There might be brief outages here and there, but it doesn't negate the core security of these protocols.

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sebscholl 870 days ago
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree with a lot of how you analyze it.

I guess what feels odd is that while so much of the web is co-dependent on different products or services, that is still different from centralized vs. decentralized. So when a network is decentralized, yet the keys to it's main highway remains in the control of one person (or group) that runs a server and manages a domain, it feels a bit contradictory.

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latchkey 870 days ago
The path to decentralization isn't binary. Just because at one point in time, the keys are in one set of pockets, doesn't mean that can't just as easily move to another set of pockets.

In my eyes, the critical thing here is that no single entity can do something such as double spend on the network.

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