Cloudflare Announces an Ethereum Gateway (coindesk.com) 19
Internet security provider Cloudflare is introducing the Ethereum Gateway to its Distributed Web Gateway toolbox enabling users to interact with the Ethereum network without installing any software. From a report: This is part of Cloudflare's Distributed Web Gateway project to expand the decentralized web ecosystem and enhance its reliability, speed, and ease of use. Instead of downloading and cryptographically verifying hundreds of gigabytes of data -- an impossible task for low-power devices and those with low technical barriers to entry -- the gateway enables any device with web access to interact with the Ethereum network. This setup will make it possible to explore the blockchain and add interactive elements to sites powered by Ethereum smart contracts. In fact, the gateway gives people the ability to put new contracts on Ethereum with having to run a node, because Cloudflare will take a signed transaction and push it to the network thereby allowing miners to cryprographicaly add it. Despite the value Cloudflare brings to gateway clients, the service is completely free. Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare's Head of Cryptography, explains that the program "leverages the existing Cloudflare network, which already provides a number of free services."
like decentralization, but without the redundancy (Score:4, Insightful)
like decentralization, but without the redundancy
It's pretty clear that Cloudflare, like so many other organizations who must certainly know better, that by facilitating the outsourcing of the one requirement expected of users in a decentralized system - the requirement to maintain a copy of all the network's ground truth history so as not to depend on any other user for authority - they reduce that network's entire claim of decentralization to mere theater.
Decentralization doesn't simply and naively mean "has more than one center," especially if the tendency over time is for that claim to become weaker rather than stronger to do concentration of leverage on to a "center of decentralization" such as as they are building here.
Re: (Score:1)
"the requirement to maintain a copy of all the network's ground truth history so as not to depend on any other user for authority" - You need to expand on the vulnerability/flaw you're claiming here, that makes little sense as written.
I'm trying to parse your meaning out of it, can you rephrase? Blockchain is never "fully independent of other users authority" AFAIK. This is a system overlayed on top of other systems, it's not a la carte the only solution here.
AFAIK they all work that way, you require the
Trust (Score:1)
Currency is a trusted, accepted, and easily converted method to trade for goods or services. The more complex, restrictive, and variable the currency, the lest likely it will be used to trade for goods and services. Lots of real money is being spent to fund these fiat currency. There will be very few people making and millions of people will loosing money until they get it right. Each fiat currency hopes to form a kind of international currency un-tethered from one governmental or corporate entity.
You can't synchronize a full etherum node anyway.. (Score:1)
Trust is not important (Score:1)
that's why you should let the world's largest man-in-the-middle Cloudflare sit between you and the Ethereum network. What could possibly go wrong?