Hashgraph is unbelievably centralized

By Keats_in_Rome:

Hashgraph say they are a "generation 4" blockchain. There are big claims of 50,000 - 100,000 transactions a second, all on this DAG with a novel consensus mechanism. I recently attended a hashgraph meetup, as I was interested in the project. What I saw there astounded me.

To start: Hashgraph has a reputation of being "corporate" but I didn't understand it until I heard more about the project. This thing is barely even a distributed ledger. It is like ripple on steroids in terms of its centralization.

Here's the low down: unlike all the other public blockchains based on open source software, hashgraph is patented. It's patented by a company called Swirlds. Swirlds gets 10% of all profits from Hedera, a for-profit company that will manage hashgraph. The patents are to prevent hard forks - it is literally illegal to hard fork hashgraph unless you own the patent.

The governance structure of Hedera (which will make all the decisions about hashgraph) is just a 39 person board. Each spot is occupied by a representative of a big (multi-billion dollar) company. All decisions go through them. This company will own 60% (!) of the supply for the foreseeable future. All dapps and companies that run on hashgraph will have to pay Hedera directly to use the chain. This makes hashgraph very much a permissioned chain, since just running a dapp on them requires not just permission, but also payment to the for-profit company.

Now normally blockchain governance is a pretty messy process. But one great thing about it is that a system of checks and balances arose between miners and developers. Both can hard fork (the nuclear option) against one another. As we've seen with the DAO, even a PoW chain like ethereum isn't really immutable: it can be hard forked to solve problems or even thefts, or unlock frozen wallets, provided that the devs, miners, and community agree. In cases of disagreement two chains are created. But generally the threat of this helps achieve governance consensus. Even the chains without explicit governance, like bitcoin, are based on this system of checks and balances, which is in turned based on the ability to hard fork. When we say "bitcoin is immutable" we mean a few different things, but a big one is that no one entity has any say about what the real bitcoin is. If any individual entity could tell us which is the real bitcoin, they could just change what they want in a fork and then label that "bitcoin" and we'd all have to go along. This has had its flaws, but the system still works after 10 years. And notably, there are new attempts at more fair and efficient on-chain governance, with things like Tezos, and also EOS (which puts power on the hands of token holders as voters).

Hashgraph throws this evolved system, as well as new attempts to design novel types of decentralized governance, out the window, in favor of profit for Hedera and Swirlds. In doing so, they obliterate the idea of immutability on Hashgraph.

All decisions about use of hashgraph and how hashgraph evolves, and what forks to take (such as code upgrades) all run through the 39 person committee. This is kind of like having a government made entirely of just an unelected senate! While already this is absurdly centralized, most are going to be big (read: profit motivated) companies, making it barely more than feudal system of corporate overlords. When asked about whether the companies would collude, all the hashgraph presenter could respond with was

"some are companies from different industries so collusion is unlikely."

But it gets even worse. Unlike all other chains, due to its patent-enforcement, there is no community or miners veto. Flipping that: Basically a single council, made of corporate representatives, can hard fork (change) the hashgraph blockchain at will, and no one has any other option than going with what they decide, because they legally cannot hardfork away. If the immutability of your blockchain is maintained by such a small number of people with significant incentive to collude, your blockchain is not really immutable. Even more crazily, the chain will also have a PoS component, and the corporate council will own 60% of the supply, meaning that by definition the chain is compromised from the start, since the security of any PoS chain relies on no one entity controlling the majority of supply to be staked.

All in all, every aspect of the project, from its permissioned rent-seeking nature to its governance to its patented nature to its centralize supply in a PoS coin, is simply so far beyond the pale it is insane. Luckily, the chain is not even open to anyone but accredited investors, and even that will be only a tiny portion of supply - most will go to VCs and corporate backers.

And finally, the stats aren't that impressive. 50k tps and a 3 sec latency was what was floated. EOS can in theory reach that 50k tps, and has a 0.5 sec latency. Dfinity might reach those tps, again in theory. As for smart contracts: they aren't even building their own VM - it's just lifted from ethereum, which means it suffers the same problems (like the many bugs ethereum has been the victim of). So it's not like they are bringing anything new in terms of smart contracts.

You may not have been able to invest in hashgraph anyways, but please, devs and community members, don't support this. Don't buy it on the market. And if you can, let people know this isn't what crypto stands for.

Also they didn't order enough pizza at the meetup and it was all gone before I could get a slice. So fuck these guys.

tldr; hashgraph is controlled by a council of 39 people chosen from big corporations and patented so no one can hard fork, meaning they can change the chain how they want and no one can do anything. Council owns 60% of the supply on a PoS coin. Devs and dapps all pay rent to the for-profit council to use the chain.

*Re-posted from Reddit by Keats_in_rome