Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it.
With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it.
Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on.
But no one should consider this a fundamental paradigm shift & democratization compare to traditional financial systems controlled by a a very small number of big players. Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions.
Although I’ll clarify a bit: I’m actually a proponent of having a layer of human judgement that can fix a problem when things go off the rails. The issue is that in crypto this layer is even less accessible to smaller players than in traditional finance. The DAO was able to throw its weight around and get a hard fork, but how many other groups with much less influence have suffered from similar problems and exploits without that same benefit?
Yes, even in traditional finance there are some types of irreversible fraud. But for every day transactions, for using money as a daily part of transactions necessary to live your life and not just as a speculative investment, crypto falls far short.
If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. If my wallet is pick pocketed or I simply lose it by accident I have a similar recourse to mitigate the fallout. Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen. But as a major change & liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments there seems to be nothing more that shouted rhetoric and wishful thinking.
With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it.
Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on.
But no one should consider this a fundamental paradigm shift & democratization compare to traditional financial systems controlled by a a very small number of big players. Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions.
Although I’ll clarify a bit: I’m actually a proponent of having a layer of human judgement that can fix a problem when things go off the rails. The issue is that in crypto this layer is even less accessible to smaller players than in traditional finance. The DAO was able to throw its weight around and get a hard fork, but how many other groups with much less influence have suffered from similar problems and exploits without that same benefit?
Yes, even in traditional finance there are some types of irreversible fraud. But for every day transactions, for using money as a daily part of transactions necessary to live your life and not just as a speculative investment, crypto falls far short.
If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. If my wallet is pick pocketed or I simply lose it by accident I have a similar recourse to mitigate the fallout. Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen. But as a major change & liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments there seems to be nothing more that shouted rhetoric and wishful thinking.