How does that work?
If you’re not validating transactions - you’re trusting a third party. There are no light clients that avoid this problem. It remains to be seen if they are even possible.
The way it works is that there is a committee of validators in the consensus protocol that is required to sign the head of the chain. We use cryptography known as BLS signatures to perform signature aggregation, meaning you can verify a single signature to ensure that whole committee is correct. The state of the chain can be represented as a Merkle trie, and we can obtain the actual committee as a branch of this tree which can be used during the verification process.
https://medium.com/chainsafe-systems/lodestar-releases-light...
It's really neat and there are working prototypes out there today.
This is how I feel about the exchanges generally, which wield an incredible amount of influence in the crypto markets, for better or worse. It's a complete tangent, but reading about Tether's shifting story around its capital reserves terrifies me.
I have yet to see a blockchain implementation that's easy enough to use on its own that it could achieve widespread adoption without a strong market desire to have someone else manage the complexity of it for you. People talk about decentralization all day long while completely ignoring the fact that we've just shifted the centralized authority from one entity to another.
The system is not simple at all.
The benefits are only potentially here (eth fees are wild).
The solution involves the opposite of religious principles the mob believes in.
Isn’t the whole point of a market that we trust each other enough to have a shared understanding of what value is? How can a market function when you trust no one else in it? Cash is a perfect example of this: it’s only worth something because we all agree that it’s worth something, we can’t eat it or do anything else with it other than to exchange it for goods. Crypto isn’t any different.
It will be interesting how this holds up if Tether is actually just “printing” money as they go. If the rumors are true and they go bust or are shut down, one could easily see that event catalyzing a crypto market meltdown similar to what we saw in 2008 where speculation was out of control. Will the energy remain in the crypto space if the crypto markets fall victim to the very thing they were created to prevent?
Yes, because the energy in the cryptocurrency space is based not on rational analysis but religious fervor. The inconvenient objective facts will be explained away rather than addressed.
No, hence why we need the state to print the money, regulate the markets, and put the bad guys in jail.
This isn’t really true as there’s a bunch of decentralized AMM’s(automated market maker) now: uniswap, sushiswap, pancakeswap
Bitcoin core is pretty easy to run yourself, no technical skills required.
Now there are lots of rpc providers and it is much easier to spin up your own node
Check out erigon client it is an archive node with much lower resource requirements than geth archival nodes, about 1/10th the requirements and that gulf will likely expand
pruned geth is still much lower than that though, but at least erigon gets rid of some of the state-storage centralization arguments (and lets inquisitive people browse prior chain states and simulate environments)
anybody that wants their own privacy has much better ways to get it
But Tails + TorBrowser + Metamask extension is also good enough if you want to hide info from Infura, analytics packages etc
If you are communicating directly to the node.
Infura, on the other hand, uses a load balancer so it receives transactions before they hit their nodes, which means that server can assume it was the first to receive.
If you are operating on clearnet then you need your own node for privacy.
A TorOS lets you do this on darknet just fine though, its some random onion or exit node IP.
That's a good indication that it is not decentralized ;).
One of the weirdest trends I’ve seen in Web3 discussions is the insistence that better alternatives exist, but for some reason nobody is using them, talking about them, or even naming them in discussions.
There are many, many WalletConnect https://walletconnect.com/ compatible wallets that can be used with most dapps as well. There are close to 100 of these: https://walletconnect.com/registry/wallets
As for RPCs, here's a list for you: https://github.com/arddluma/awesome-list-rpc-nodes-providers
If you want to run you're own RPC node, it's not so hard as there are docker and docker-compose images that will let you get geth (or nethermind, or erigon) that will let you spin up an RPC pretty trivially.
The more important thing for decentralization IMO, is that you can reasonably switch, even if most people don't. Think about how this plays out in the browser or email markets and compare it to how much of a difference that is to completely locked in services like Facebook.
https://moralis.io/ and https://www.alchemy.com/ are Infura alternatives
You can Google "metamask alternatives" if you want, there are lots. I won't vouch for any of them.
That's just overly reductive. You certainly benefit from all kinds of vectors of decentralisation regardless of you using MetaMask, or possibly having connectively problems if a popular nodes goes down.
You can test this very simply, because regardless of the common node you are using, are still exposed to all the downsides and responsibilities that decentralisation brings, such as the possibility of losing your private key and being unable to recover your funds. So the decentralisation is still clearly there.
Ethereum as a whole and the raw smart contracts of most DApps actually are decentralized, but there are SPOFs in the UI, name service, and transaction gateway. If you aren't willing to run your own geth instance and understand Solidity/EVM, it's not really decentralized for you.