I vouched for this comment as I believe it has a point: I think decentralised systems in general have a tendency to yield centralised hotspots for convenience and scalability reasons as networks grow, but in the case of blockchains and Ethereum in particular, running a full node (that can provide the functionality of Infura for instance) is becoming extremely infeasible.

I acknowledge that this is still much more decentralised in comparison to status quo but it is important to acknowledge also that it is still not as decentralised as it is marketed to be.

You can buy a ~$500 intel NUC, install Geth, and run a full node in less than an hour.

For an archival node you might also need to buy a large hard drive, but it's feasible.

That’s not a full node, that’s a “fast sync” node that has to trust third parties about state of the chain.

You can run a full node on AWS in a couple of minutes, they've a managed Blockchain service that allows you to create an eth node in literally a few click.

Not sure what's infeasible for you, but to me that sounds pretty reasonable.

If you've the skills just download geth and run it yourself in your own hardware. There are people who do this on a daily basis to mine eth and they're not hackers.

Not a full node, a fast-sync trusting third party node.

I doubt anyone is able to sync a full node from genesis block anymore.

> I doubt anyone is able to sync a full node from genesis block anymore.

Because 1 terabyte of storage space is so out of reach, today? [1]

Ethereum Chain Full Sync Data Size: 954.28 GB as of 09/06/2021 [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-1TB-SSD-WDS100T2B0A/dp/B073... [2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data...

sha256 is only 256 bits, so it's obviously easy to solve right?

i suppose life is more satisfying on the surface, when you only need to argue against straw-men, but surely that's a ticking time bomb?

he simultaneously invokes and cries strawmen, the most common of feats

one invokes straw-man and can't recognize when it's being pointed out by example of another, more ridiculous straw-man. sigh.

just stop and think for a second. you don't need to go down this road. drop the initial straw-man and try asking a question if you don't understand what's being argued.

The beginning of the path to transcending the invocation of strawmen, is to identify your own strawmen.

so why don't you?

if you're unable to walk back the thread, i'll remind that you were the one who started straw-maning by assuming that i think chainsize alone is the problem with syncing a full node.

stop making assumptions and start asking questions.

The irony deepens.

Walk back the thread yourself and notice my opening is a question.

You replied with a strawman disguised as a question instead of answering it.

ah yes, the "i only asked a question!" defense. immediately followed by "your question was dishonest!" hypocrisy. have a nice day.

Is possible in theory, if you don't have the resources to do so is another problem.

There's other options like Alchemy and taichi for those not wanting to use infura or run their own nodes

Great point. Few articles talk about this and other similar issues.

You can specify a custom RPC.

Yes, when infura dies - the music stops in eth world. And since lots of other tokens run on eth - music stops for them too. It’s a joke of a “decentralized” system, really.

Edit: don't read this as "when in future Infura dies", this has already happened in the past and huge chunks of crypto world were left stranding.