Maybe, but it was under the pretense that the project was intending to be "decentralized", not controlled by whales who followed the founders' advise of disguising their purchases.
The point is that the founders apparently intended for large whales to disguise their purchases. This means individuals bought into a system that was advertised as being decentralized, when it was apparently intended to merely /appear/ to be decentralized. Remember Ethereum is planning on moving to "proof of stake".
Wouldn't it benefit you much much more because, well, you premined a billion dollars worth of ETH for yourself and designed Ethereum to benefit wealthy people?
>the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.
That is exactly what Ethereum's direction has been for years now. It is centralized on Amazon AWS via Infura's nodes (which they charge access to, mind you). It's not a world computer. It's EC2 with additional complexity (and fees).
>Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow
Really? He has consistently argued for on-chain scaling and for people to not validate the blockchain state much like Elon Musk, with his seemingly 101-level understanding of blockchains. This post is a strange 180 from Vitalik's usual "do the opposite of Bitcoin because that is good marketing".
Now Vitalik is aware of the importance of running a full node and validating the blockchain state, and how blockchains can't scale, and how keeping blockchain bloat limited to allow easy verification is important? I'm convinced Vitalik has been replaced by some Bizzarro version of himself because of how astonishing this 180 is.
It took creating an entirely new separate altcoin, complete with massive premine for himself, and the greater part of a decade, to finally realize Bitcoiners were right all along.
You can do much worse things in a PoS system since power in the system is tied to the asset (ETH). Ethereum DeFi toys are hacked on a daily basis and millions upon millions of dollars worth of ETH is stolen.
It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they controlled more ETH than any single account in the system.
Coinvotes in the context of massive insider premines is completely useless. Of course a coinvote would reflect "Yes to censoring the DAO hacker" because the DAO hacker controlled more ETH than the top 3 current ETH accounts. And the insiders stand to benefit the most from proof of stake because it's a system designed to further enrich the already rich.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that Vitalik is part of the Ethereum Foundation which controls the trademark to Ethereum as well as all of the popular social media channels (r/ethereum, @ethereum twitter account, ethereum.org domain). Ethereum is the illusion of decentralization.
Bitcoin layer-2 massively reduces the amount of energy used per transaction. For every on-chain Bitcoin transaction, potentially millions upon millions of Lightning transactions can occur.
Nodes enforce the ruleset that miners must abide by, and can invalidate new blocks that miners generate. You can see examples of this in history e.g. bitcoin.com mining a block with a greater block size than consensus allowed, which caused the block to be invalidated and the cost of energy wasted.
Important to note that Vitalik massively gains from Ethereum transitioning to Proof-of-Stake since he controls a large percentage of total ETH due to premining it before the project launched.
"In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value."
That's not true at all. The decision makers in Ethereum care overwhelmingly about maximizing the value of their massive premine holdings. The latest EIP-1559 proposal (tl;dr ETH gets burned in every transaction) makes their stash an even larger percentage of the overall ETH distribution. Which is even more egregious when you learn that proof-of-stake rewards those with the most money (read: the decision makers).
"Wrapped Bitcoin" is not "porting" BTC to Ethereum. It's merely a token that represents some sort of claim on actual BTC held with a single custodian (Bitgo).