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Comment by eterpstra | Hacker News Reader

GitHub! It's all open source. EIPs are Ethereum Improvement Proposals. You can view them all here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues

Ethereum Foundation blog is a good read on technical detail with no price discussion: https://blog.ethereum.org/

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Why are they using GitHub, a closed-source, traditional, centralized code hosting platform?

Can't they use something "web3" even for this basic task of hosting a git repository (remembering that git itself is completely de-centralized)?

i know you are being snarky, but still, people are working on it https://radicle.xyz/

Why do you think that I am being snarky? I thought it was the very first question anyone would ask?! If you can't even do this basic thing that only devs would use (hence I assume it to be a much easier first target to get working as they are technical and can jump through hoops if necessary), then I imagine there's very few things you can make work, currently?

That said, it's nice to see there's some serious work going into this new stuff... driven by a non-profit foundation https://radicle.foundation/ , that does make me take it more seriously, I will check it out.

The answer is that decentralization is in many ways considered a spectrum. We're a long ways away from being able to interact with web3 with no centralized points. As an example, you're reliant on your ISP, DNS, and the web of trust (involving tiers of certificate authorities) to even connect to a web3-enabled site from your browser. The most popular wallet for interacting with smart contracts in the browser is source-available, but not open source.

Of course, any interactions with the blockchain directly (calling methods of deployed smart contracts, or transferring tokens), are decentralized, but if you want to verify the source code of the contract you're interacting with, the most convenient way again involves relying on a centralized service (etherscan or similar for other blockchains), while the decentralized way would involve downloading the contract source yourself, compiling it, and comparing that with what's on the blockchain.

While transfers have been "solved" in the cryptocurrency world (see Bitcoin et al), and likewise "computation" has been "solved" (see Ethereum et al), file storage is still not solved and seems to be a bit harder as it's taking time for the various solutions to mature enough to be useful for day to day usage.

I think it's kind-of-solved with IPFS and integrating IPFS hashes into the blockchain.

No, if you think so I don't think you properly understand IPFS. IPFS suffers the same problem as HTTP, content disappears when people stop serving it. Yes, it's easier to make sure it's online as it's content-addressed, but content still disappears. Filecoin is supposed to solve that particular problem, but seems to have trouble maturing right now as it's not mainstream yet to use, or maybe it solves the wrong problem/solves the right problem with the wrong solution.

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