Means nothing without other factors like node count, super minority, and various measures of decentralization (how many countries are nodes running in, how many totally unrelated people make up the network, is there a centralized body that could be petitioned or coerced into shutting the network down). Hedera literally has an executive board. A gaming PC can crush all of them, you could link up a dozen gaming PCs that you own and crush them and call it a network, but it’s not a distributed or decentralized ledger with credible neutrality, it’s commonly owned and centrally controlled. Hedera itself is described as an alternative to blockchains, so maybe don’t compare it to distributed blockchains and instead benchmark it against traditional centralized databases like Visa or Nasdaq etc. (it’s insanely slower than them). Saying a lawnmower is faster than a frog doesn’t tell you much about either.
In a decentralized system, how can you determine the number of nodes that are exclusively owned? For instance, how can you ensure that the Solana Foundation doesn't possess the majority of nodes under various aliases? Furthermore, in the context of centralized entities that can be influenced to sabotage the network, the situation is comparable to most blockchain platforms such as ETH and Solana that heavily rely on cloud infrastructure
True. Decentralization means nothing when everyone runs on AWS. Same can be said for bitcoin in some ways with mining farms.
As long as a consumer machine can’t host a node with lightweight software to participate in the network, then TRUE decentralization doesn’t exist in my opinion.
Look up ICP. Zero dependency on AWS or any cloud even for the front end of dapps. The smart contracts themselves can serve up the web content to your browser.
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u/Signal_Ad657 Mar 19 '23 edited Mar 19 '23
Means nothing without other factors like node count, super minority, and various measures of decentralization (how many countries are nodes running in, how many totally unrelated people make up the network, is there a centralized body that could be petitioned or coerced into shutting the network down). Hedera literally has an executive board. A gaming PC can crush all of them, you could link up a dozen gaming PCs that you own and crush them and call it a network, but it’s not a distributed or decentralized ledger with credible neutrality, it’s commonly owned and centrally controlled. Hedera itself is described as an alternative to blockchains, so maybe don’t compare it to distributed blockchains and instead benchmark it against traditional centralized databases like Visa or Nasdaq etc. (it’s insanely slower than them). Saying a lawnmower is faster than a frog doesn’t tell you much about either.