The Genesis London blockchain conference held in February this year gathered a lot of blockchain and cryptocurrency experts. One of them was the computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer who pointed out to a study done by the prestigious University of Cornell – that shows the Ethereum blockchain network is currently more decentralized than Bitcoin’s.
Since 2015, there has been a lot of false information about the technology and the foundation of Ethereum’s blockchain network circulating among the crypto communities. This has lead to a lot of confusion and made a lot of investors, users and developers to believe the ‘false promises’ in the Ethereum network, making it inferior to other major blockchains in terms of security and decentralization.
The study done by the Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer and researchers confirms that. It also confirms that less Ethereum nodes are linked to institutions or organizations rather than Bitcoin. This means that more nodes on the Ethereum network are operated by individuals rather than companies.
“The data shows that the [Ethereum] nodes are both in the latency space, and also geographically more distributed round the world. Ethereum nodes tend to come from all sorts of places, smaller networks, and homegrown entities, as opposed to Bitcoin nodes, which tend to be located in data centres. Our study found that the majority of Bitcoin nodes, 56%, are in data centres,” said Sirer at the conference.
Basically, Ethereum is both structurally and fundamentally different to Bitcoin because of its network – and how it is optimized to handle decentralized applications (dapps). The Ethereum network should be able to process thousands of transactions per second. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, emphasized that full scalability of Ethereum could take 3 to 5 years, depending on the implementation process.
At the London conference, Sirar also pointed to the fact that hardware-based technologies such as the Intel SGX help public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum – settling thousands of transactions per second.
As Sirar stated:
“SGX is a very exciting technology, and there are other trusted computing technologies, not SGX, but by other vendors, that provide similar guarantees. What that gives you is the ability to know what protocol somebody else is following. That is a fundamental leap.”
In the long term, Sirar believes that there will be a rapidly increasing number of institutions, conglomerates, retailers and companies escaping the centralized databases and moving to blockchain technology.
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