Oh it absolutely is. If there's a piece of code running somewhere that can be corrupted or arbitrarily changed by someone then it will be exploited. The technology exists to make code that can only be changed if the majority of actual users of said code agree to the change.

Not sure that sounds like a great protocol for patching exploit bugs. "I'm sorry, we can't patch log4j until the votes are counted" It's also not what happens in practice in cryptocurrency circles either. See the 2013 bitcoin accidental fork, for example.

That's actually what happened to Compound recently. It's still much better than an arbitrary shutdown or upgrade because there's no recourse *at all* then.

Yes, centralization by company is a big threat epeus.blogspot.com/2010/06/s… but monoculture is also a threat too indieweb.org/monoculture and cryptocurrency amplifies that tendency

What monoculture are you referring to? As someone who's part of that ecosystem, i can guarantee it's a lot more diverse than the orders of magnitude larger than the indieweb one for example...

Are there more than one implementation of the e*t*h protocol? As far as I can tell everyone participating in the network is expected to run the same source code.

Please do your own research before posting messages like this. It's all public. Ethereum has several "node" clients in its 1.x version (geth, parity, erigon...) And an explicit goal of 2.0 was to have actually at least 6.

I did look around and couldn't find any mentions of those on any easily searchable docs. Where is this stuff described? I don't even see any reference to that on the main page about it ethereum.org/en/eth2/vision/

I stand corrected, I finally found an explicit reference: ethereum.org/en/developers/d… "The community maintains multiple open-source clients, developed by different teams using different programming languages." That's great, so at least it's only… aaronparecki.com/2022/01/09/…

Thanks for digging deeper! The "network" centralization is actually pretty much expected though?