Major Blockchains Are Pretty Much Still Centralized, Research Finds

At the beach, they say, all your troubles melt away.

But that's not entirely the case for researchers who spent part of this week at the Financial Crypto 2018 conference on the Caribbean island of Curacao, discussing the decentralization of the two largest crypto protocols, bitcoin and ethereum - or where they're lacking in this regard.

Presented on March 2, a new paper, titled "Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship: The State of Cryptocurrency Governance" by University College London researchers, delved into the topic further by measuring how many developers are contributing to and commenting on cryptocurrency codebases.

For one, the researchers looked at "commits" - bundles of changes a developer proposes to make to the codebase. According to the paper, 7 percent of all the files in the Bitcoin Core software were written by one developer, while about 20 percent to ethereum were written by a single coder.

As such, this signals that ethereum is "a little" more centralized than bitcoin is in this regard, said Sarah Azouvi, a UCL computer science PhD student and co-author of the paper.

It's an interesting take as it relates to the fierce debates happening within the ethereum community right now, as two sides go head-to-head on an ethereum improvement proposal (EIP) 867.

EIP 867 looks to establish an easier process for recovering lost funds via software changes - a controversial topic that stems back to The DAO hack in 2016, when ethereum developers decided to reverse transactions in order to give victims their funds back.

Yet, even though many similar discussions regularly take place on GitHub, the overall pool of users involved was more limited than Azouvi, and many others, expected.

She told CoinDesk:

"It's still not a lot of people. Most of them are making just a couple comments here and there. A few people are doing most of the discussion."

The decision-makers

But ethereum's debate over lost funds wasn't the only reason for attendees in Curacao to discuss the network. Another reason highlighted by the paper was governance, as most of the major code changes are still written by ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin himself.

"He stands out from the rest," said Azouvi.