Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed...
by markasoftware on Monday February 03, 2025 @10:19PM
(#42927390)
Fame is part of it, but it's more that it's IMO probably the only truly decentralized cryptocurrency. Not just in terms of the nodes and miners being well spread out between organizations and parts of the world, but also in terms of its development and governance. Sure, there's a relatively small group of core contributors to Bitcoin, but they don't have much fame or personality cults around them like Ethereum's Vitalik does. They are really just restricted to maintaining and adding well-agreed-upon new features to Bitcoin. Eg when Segwit happened, a lot of miners held out on supporting it for a long time becasue it was a bit controversial. Meanwhile with Ethereum, if Vitalik really pushed for some controversial change, it would probably happen. Once you go further down the list than Ethereum, things get really bad, with many cryptos' development being entirely driven by a small group of people in a for-profit company, with miners and users that will blindly update to the newest version regardless of what's in it.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed...
by 2030ai on Monday February 03, 2025 @10:38PM
(#42927563)
Eth famously forked and reversed txns due to someone getting scammed.
Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed...
by markasoftware on Monday February 03, 2025 @10:51PM
(#42927661)
the fact that eth classic was created from this incident and still exists does inspire some confidence that ethereum's governance is somewhat decentralized also, to be fair.
And IIRC it wasn't a "scam", it was a bug in a smart contract.
Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed...
by 2030ai on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @12:43AM
(#42928499)
Yes a smart contract bug. Hacked might be a better word. Or outsmarted?
Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed...
by 127 on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @02:38AM
(#42929317)
ETH forked because the contract was poorly written and they didn't want to honor the contract because their buddies would have lost a lot of money and the project would have gotten an egg to their face.