The Ethereum merge is done
Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought&#x2F;built massive data centers to mine it.<p>With the merge &amp; staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it.<p>Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved &amp; 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.<p>But no one should consider this a fundamental paradigm shift &amp; 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.<p>Although I’ll clarify a bit: I’m actually a <i>proponent</i> 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 <i>is even less accessible</i> 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?<p>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.<p>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 &amp; liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments there seems to be nothing more that shouted rhetoric and wishful thinking.