Centralized projects are more likely to be deemed securities. If that were to happen with a coin Coinbase actively trades, they would be in legal trouble.
The idea behind Solana was and is fantastic. Designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go. This is what Bitcoin was originally meant to do before its development roadmap was diverted from the original plans of Satoshi and to a lesser extend Gavin. There's nothing technically centralized about Solana, but the early VC funding and later support by FTX and SBF was unfortunate.
Maybe designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go, but that's not "the idea behind Solana". There are like 30 chains trying that, many which predate Solana. Tron was trying to do that before Solana was even an idea. It's not clear to me what "the idea behind Solana" is, beyond a bunch of buzzwords which aren't even unique. I see very little in their goals that differentiates Solana from chains like Avalanche or Near, but both of those are better designed technically and more decentralized.
And there absolutely is something technically centralized about Solana. Multiple times before it was even listed on Coinbase, it was stopped and restarted by the developers. That should not be possible on a decentralized system. Period.
I implore you to recognize that you do not know what you are talking about, and stop confidently spreading misinformation. If you were taken in by Solana, recognize that investing in Solana was an obvious, avoidable mistake. If it wasn't obvious to you, it's because you're severely undereducated with regards to cryptocurrencies to be investing in them. I don't mean that to be rude--it's just that I don't want to be unclear. The people who invested in Solana weren't making educated decisions, they were gambling.
>And there absolutely is something technically centralized about Solana. Multiple times before it was even listed on Coinbase, it was stopped and restarted by the developers. That should not be possible on a decentralized system. Period.
No, that's dishonest. It wasn't stopped and restarted by "developers". It was stopped and restarted by validators running Solana nodes after a massive surge in transactions locked it up for a few hours. The validators decided to run a forked version patched by developers because it was in their economic best interest to have a functioning chain.
Anyone can invest in the hardware and crypto to become a validator. This is no different than what happened when ETH and ETH classic forked, or when any other crypto hard forks during an emergency.
The validators are a small group, but that will change with scale, just like any other crypto.
If you can point to a single technical reason why Solana is centralized over other PoS cryptos, I'll happily stand corrected.
I don't think I said Coinbase should be committed to decentralization. What I will say is more nuanced: if Coinbase and other exchanges aren't committed to decentralization, then you and I have good reason to distrust those exchanges' motives.
From the perspective of an individual investor in cryptocurrencies, decentralization is the entire benefit of cryptocurrencies.
Hacker News isn't a place where this will be popular to say this, but some regulations are good--they exist to protect from scams and obvious economic flaws.
Some regulations are misguided too. Decentralized currencies by their unregulatable nature avoid all regulations: good regulations and bad regulations. If you have reason to avoid the bad regulations, then cryptocurrencies are a good investment for you.
A centralized cryptocurrency is the worst of both worlds. It's (temporarily) unregulated, but it's not unregulatable. That means that investors don't get the benefits of avoiding the bad regulations, because in the long run, centralized cryptocurrencies can be brought into the regulation fold. But it also means that investors don't get the benefit of good regulations, because a scammer can exit long before their crypto gets regulated.
That's a pretty high-level, general view, but this plays out in a lot of specific ways, including what has happened with FTX.
