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Posted on Mar 11, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Decentralisation & Respect Layer 1

Written by 0xBE5M.eth

Twitter: @0xBE5M

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Have you ever wondered "where do these fruits and veggies come from" when you go to a local supermarket? They obviously did not grow in the supermarket, and you know that there is a complete suite of farming, logistics and business processes to make "farm-to-table" possible. But it's all too complicated, you just want to eat your cool bananas.

The same applies to the distributed ledger system, a.k.a. the blockchain we see today.

Yes, you can buy fruits and veggies with no apparent brand name from various supermarket chains solely based on your willingness, just like you can send whoever has a 42-character hexadecimal Ethereum wallet address an Ether, does it make them decentralised?

What if I tell you, the global seed market is a very consolidated market with only a handful of major players?

"Wired People Should Know Something about Wires"

It's a quote from Neal Stephenson written for Wired magazine, who is often referred to as the prophetic inventor of the Metaverse.

One must understand that a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network, like Ethereum or Bitcoin, is an overlay network — that is, it’s built on top of the public Internet. It's decentralised within its layer of networking in the OSI model, it's all very dependent on the underlying network (routing & switching) and infrastructure (fibre optical cables & conduits).

To help you better understand the idea, we firstly take a look at what happens when you send an Ether on Ethereum --

  1. Sender enters the amount to send and receiver's wallet address into Metamask

  2. Metamask sends the signed transaction to an Ethereum Node (Infura by default)

  3. The receiving Ethereum node verifies the transaction, add it to its mempool and start broadcasting to other Ethereum nodes

    - Peer Ethereum nodes receiving the transaction will validate the transaction and move it into their own mempool. It will broadcast to additional peers, essentially propagating the transaction across the Ethereum network

  4. During the propagation process, miners (a specific kind of node) also receive the transaction from peers. It will validate and attempt to add the transaction to a new block. Eventually, a successful miner adds a block with the transaction to the Ethereum network

  5. The new block is broadcasted over the network, as all nodes receive the new block from their peers, they see the included transaction and remove it from their mempool

  6. Receiver opens up his/her Metamask wallet app and can view the balance change

Every step of the way there is network activity. For example, when Metamask on my computer sends the signed transaction to Infura, this happened:

Traceroute from My Computer to Infura

My computer sent the packet to my home router then modem in Sydney Australia, and to my ISP (TPG). My ISP forwarded the packet to its global IP transit/peering partner (Tata Communications) and it went to the United States. It arrived in a data centre in LA before handing off to Amazon's network in Dallas, which looks like ended up in a server in AWS US-East.

Sounds simple enough, right? Let's expand the journey a little more.

Before the packet arrives my ISP's server (BRAS to be precise), it first went through a network called NBN. NBN stands for National Broadband Network, it is an Australian government-owned enterprise that design, build and operate Australia's telecommunication infrastructure. Simply put, they build and operate the wires that connect me to my ISP.

Once the packet is in and out of my ISP's network, it went from Sydney to LA, likely taking the route from Sydney to Guam via Pipe Pacific Cable 1, then from Guam to Hawaii and Hermosa Beach in the California United States via SEA-US submarine cable.

When it finally arrives the American continent, it travels through miles and miles long fibre optic cables through cities and perhaps farmlands, and to its final destination.

It all appears to be a click of a button to you, it's complicated behind the scene.

Be reminded that these steps and processes stated above are still overly simplified, a lot of concepts and details are omitted. Places like the Meet-Me Room (MMR) in datacentres where networks interconnect each other with wires, or manholes on beaches where submarine cables are terminated do exist; there are also things like DSLAMs, routers, switches, backhaul providers, autonomous systems (AS), BGP, DNS, Point of Presence (PoP), etc that are all involved in making the transaction possible.

Submarine Cable Map - https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

A Rather Sad (Political) Reality

We all read about The Great Firewall of China, Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet, PRISM, Tempora, Seizure of Megaupload, etc, it's not surprising that governments around the globe have been more or less engaged in political, ideological or economical controversies and are trying to install or expand governance over to the Internet space.

The recent Russia-Ukraine war is just pouring oil on the flames, news of Metamask/Infura/OpenSea Banning Users and Coinbase to Promote Sanction Compliance sparked discussion among crypto space, and we have good reasons to discuss these further more than ever.

As mentioned in the previous example, the transaction sent using Metamask arrives at Infura's server, and so Infura gets to decide if it allows me to do my decentralised transaction or not. Fortunately, I live in Australia, not Iran, Russia or any other country on the United State's sanction list, it went through successfully.

With over 21 Million Monthly Active Users, it's safe to say that a large proportion of Ethereum users are dependent on Metamask and its default route to Infura.

When we take a step further into the rabbit hole, it's no news that all kinds of decentralised services like Infura are operating (or say relying) on AWS, the Amazon Web Service.

If you think that is not decentralised enough, according to data from Ethernodes.org, 71.56% of Ethereum nodes are on hosting services, of which AWS takes an overwhelmingly 53.3% market share of it. In another word, over 1/3 of the total Ethereum nodes are hosted on Amazon's network.

Ethereum Nodes on Hosting Services by https://ethernodes.org

It's not a new topic I just bring up today, I see these concerns constantly raised by people in the past. The solution to it, of course, is to encourage people to self-host Ethereum nodes. However, a more recent news that fewer people talked about but more profoundly influential is Cogent Shuts off Services in Russia, and it makes me less optimistic about the decentralised future.

For those who don't familiar with Cogent, it's one of the largest internet backbone carriers in the world. According to CAIDA's ranking of Autonomous Systems (AS), Cogent operates the 3rd largest network on planet earth - if you are browsing Internet today, it is almost certain that some of the packets going out from your devices have gone through their network.

Cogent disconnecting Russia does not disconnect Russia entirely from the global Internet, but it reduces the amount of overall bandwidth available for international connectivity in and out from Russia (and to some Central Asia countries as well according to the report). If we put geopolitical talks aside for a second, this unprecedented action of Internet censorship at the global level is fearful - more on this later.

And to add another fact, 48% of total Ethereum nodes are operating in the US.

Geographical Distribution of Ethereum Nodes by https://ethernodes.org

Consensus in the Crisis

Blockchain has three layers of consensus: the mathematical consensus, the technical consensus, and the people's consensus.

  • The mathematical consensus is objective, it's guaranteed by formulas and numbers. It's the Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Diffie–Hellman Key Exchange we all know of.
  • The technical consensus is semi-objective. The Proof of Work model works because people choose to run computational power to keep all nodes in the network honest. The technical details and specs are subject to change at any time at people's will.
  • People's consensus is subjective. We as crypto adopters are constantly finding and making ways for others to understand the use of blockchain technology, and to educate about the perceived value of crypto. It's the people's collective mind on blockchain that makes it great.

However as you see, there are many entities that you may or may not already know also participated in your decentralised transaction. They help to transmit the information from one end to another while they can also stop you from doing so. Since many of them are either monopolistic or owned by a government, it makes overlying applications' claim of decentralisation less credible.

The Internet infrastructure is no longer a dumb pipe, it has developed an ideology from whoever controls it. Isolationism seems unavoidable under the current global political reality, it's sad to see the phenomenon of Global village is diminishing as the world moves. We have not experienced an Internet blackout at the global level just yet, we may see it in the future.

I know everything mentioned here sounds exaggerated and cynical because I also believe Crypto-anarchism is at the core of crypto movements, but the point is, the world of the Internet is physical and not decentralised as you may think.

Ending with a great quote from the former prime minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull, there are still great challenges for all of us. We need to respect layer 1 - the physical layer - of everything.

The Infamous Malcolm Turnbull Quote