Why decentralisation matters

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So let's talk about decentralization. There's a couple of posts
that are coming up on X at the moment, and
it talks about how some other chains may be very
centralized or coming to the point where there's not enough
node operators in the network and it could start to
suffer from various attacks. So this first one here, but
actually no, let's go back to this other one. And
this came up a couple of days ago, and this

(00:22):
is about the Solana validators out there. So the network
of Solana validators has dropped dramatically. Originally, at its peak
had twenty five hundred and now they're down to roughly
eight hundred node validators, with more and more coming offline
because it's just becoming too costly to run a node.

(00:43):
So for the Solana ecosystem, it costs quite a lot
of money for the hardware to operate a node itself,
so you need cloud infrastructure, very expensive compute, and then
also a lot of storage behind it as well. So
it could cost when I was originally looking into it,
seven hundred a month at least. So now that the
chain's gone bigger, there's a large network and whatnot, those

(01:06):
costs would have scaled up. I'd have to look at
the details there to get an accurate price, but they
are a lot more expensive than other chains. Now, when
I started in the crypto space, or coming back into
it after the twenty seventeen twenty eighteen crypto winter, after
that period, I decide to come back into the crypto
space and look into what I could possibly tap into

(01:28):
and work on. So I originally looked at eth mining,
and I was potentially going to set up a mining
rig just behind me here, but it's noisy, it's hot,
cost a lot of electricity. And then back then, ethereum
was moving over to proof of steak and I didn't
have enough ethereum to jump into a proof of steak,
so you need thirty two eathh per an eth node.

(01:50):
Didn't have enough there, and I didn't have the hardware
and all that required to set up an eth mining
rig and then start mining other tokens as well. As
that wasn't really an option. So I looked at other
proof of state networks such as Solana to see if
that was viable, but like I said, the costs were
too high, and that's why I settled on Kadano and

(02:12):
that level of accessibility within the Kadana ecosystem I thought
was really really cool. Back when I first started, you
you could very much run a node on one of
these here. This is a Raspberry Pie. It cost me
two three hundred dollars I think, along with the SSD
hard drives. This was a great device. And now I

(02:33):
use use it for some other things like Grafana dashboards
and prometheust to check stats of service and stuff. But
you know, that's the cost of being a Kodano node operator.
It's very low. And now I've got more powerful home
PCs and i can run it within the you know,
the home office. It's a really cool thing. And that

(02:54):
machine back there, that's my igone node that can also
be set up as a Cardano node as well, and
I will be sitting as a Cordona node and Egon nodes.
So lots of really cool things that you can do there.
But the point is that level of accessibility just made
it really appealing for myself to become a node operator
and participate within the Cadana ecosystem. Low cost, easy maintenance,

(03:18):
and it was kind of roughly about one hundred dollars
per node per month, so that's fairly cheap, and to
be able to do that and have a very big
decentralized network is something that allows Kardana to really thrive
in the decentralization space that type of metric. So back
here at Solana had twenty five hundred at the moment,

(03:41):
Cardana's roughly got about about three thousand nodes, not all
of the mint blocks, about five hundred. I needed every
epoch to every five days to mint blocks for that period.
But you know, having that big, large, resilient network makes
it a lot harder to attack from ADS attack, the
denial of service attack, and that's what we're seeing happening

(04:03):
on the Seui network at the moment. So let me
just read this post here. Sue was dedos attacked yesterday
causing mass delays, proving again that one hundred and twenty
seven validators is not enough sufficient decentralization demands a larger
attack surface. Let this be a lesson for Soul not

(04:24):
to let the validate account drop too low. We must
win on scalability and decentralization. And Justin is very correct
on that the more nodes, the more surface there is,
the broader the attack vector you need to create to
take down a network, and that becomes more costly and

(04:45):
is usually unattainable for a lot of attackers out there.
When the costs are so high to attack a network,
it doesn't really make it worthwhile. And here we can
see Sui's validator network only had one hundred and twenty
seven nodes, So you could fire up enough servers and
enough network to block all the transactions or spam the

(05:07):
transactions on the network to stop it from operating. So
that's what's happening with Suey at the moment. It could
very well happen with the Solana ecosystem as well. If
this network here of eight hundred validators drops even further.
There's something to think about, guys, decentralization. You think, hey,
what's the big deal, Like, do we really need to

(05:28):
worry about it? And yeah, you do, because if the nodes,
if the network goes down, there is no blockchain. What's
the whole point of that. So we're making these global
systems so they're resilient to these type of attacks. Think
about all the IT hacks that have happened recently on
Snile service, on Sony taking down their networks and being

(05:50):
able to hack their networks and steal their IP. So
if they had a really resilient decentralized storage environment that
was encrypted and shy a file split into multiple different
parts such as what I go and provide, it would
have been incredibly hard for the hackers to get into
that network because it was so decentralized. But you know,

(06:11):
centralized storage, that's just how it is, and you know,
you can get in and take whatever you want, destroy
whatever you want, and it's almost impossible to or very
hard to recover from. So that's the type of resilience
that we're looking at, and that's why I absolutely love
Kardano and projects that are building on Cardano will inherit
that level of decentralization and moving away from that central

(06:32):
point of failure. So that's all I had for this
particular video update, and I just wanted to push and
show you guys why decentralization is really important and why
Cardano really shines and that level of decentralization. If you
learn something from this video, I'm Peter, I'm a Cardano ambassador.
I do and talk about all things crypto. And if

(06:53):
you enjoy the video and make sure you hit that
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I'll see you guys in the next video. M HM.