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Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap, spoke about Ethereum being decentralized, in an interview with Blockchain Insider.
Buterin started by speaking about Ethereum being centralized around him and how to get to decentralization. According to him, there has already been a huge progress in terms of decentralization. For this, he quoted the example of the concrete governance actions that happened in the last 12 months. He said:
“Number one, like a lot of the features in the constantinople hard fork that are launching in January basically happened without me. Number two, issuance reduction from 3 ether to 2 ether which is going into Constantinople, I was not involved at all.”
Recently, the core developer of Ethereum, Peter Szilagi announced that Constantinople hard fork will take place on #7080000 block around January 16, 2019. The hard fork advocates five Ethereum Improvement Protocols [EIP]s, including the implementation of the reduction of block mining reward issuance and delaying the difficulty bomb for 12 months. The decision to reduce the block reward was taken by the teams in order to reduce the inflation rate, effectively cutting the reward by 33%.
Buterin went on to say that the “Ethereum 1.x, short-term scalability improvements that are going on to the main chain before we can switch over to sharding, that whole effort started without my involvement at all.” Ethereum 1.x is an upgrade of the network, which could go live in June 2019. The update proposes a replacement of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and introduce rent for the smart contract.
He further added the actual implementation of Casper and Sharding is carried out by five different teams, whereas he is involved in writing the spec. He said:
“So I mean I would not have been able to confidently say this 18 months ago but I really do feel like the community is that if capable of acting autonomously at this point […] I mean that’s definitely not to say that I’m looking and disappearing that so that’s the thing that the trolls generally tends to interpret you saying what I say things like this but I’m definitely not disappearing”