I worked for an L1 blockchain for a couple years and while the term "decentralized" is bandied about a bit too much, reading articles like this does underscore how vulnerable global traffic is.

e.g. some EVM chains have a majority of "stake" in either one country or several adjacent countries (particularly in Asia). A cable cut there, which the article points out has happened, can lead to the blockchain getting cut off or even halting.

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scottyah 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think people conflate decentralization with redundancy or resilience. IMO it just means you have multiple points of failure instead of one.

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smallmancontrov 9 hours ago | parent [-]

10 years ago the talk of hackers partitioning the internet to double spend BTC all seemed a bit far fetched. But now crypto has trillions in market cap and governments involved -- governments that sometimes cut network cables just to send a message. The "means" and "motive" exploded by 100x, did anyone find a way to close the "opportunity" or did people just stop talking about it lol?

	▲	olalonde 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You'd also need to take down fleets of satellites in space. Double-spends aren't really easy to profit from either.

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hylaride 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the issue is that centralization is more economical due to scale, but that assumes all else (geopolitics or other black swan events) don't impact things.

We saw a similar thing with supply chains and chip suppliers.

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olalonde 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure about other blockchains but with Bitcoin, you only need one node to connect via satellite and the chain is good. In fact, there are satellites that broadcast blocks from space (no ISP required). [0]

[0] https://blockstream.com/satellite/

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embedding-shape 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> reading articles like this does underscore how vulnerable global traffic is.

Then also remember that the internet haven't seen a global outage since forever, worst parts have been when some submarine cables break and traffic has to route around it, but never has the entire thing fully went down. Considering how most of it is built with bandaids, silver-tape and WD40, it's surprising it is as resilient as it is.