Hedera ($HBAR) has announced the removal of community-run nodes from their road map, pretty much publicly giving up on their commitment to decentralization. The network is and will continue to be run by up to 39 multinational corporations that have been hand selected by the Hedera Foundation.
I’ve always believed that Hedera Hashgraph, as a leading DAG contender, has interesting technology with considerable use cases for it - if properly implemented. Therein lies the devil.
Community run nodes have been on the road map for years, and now they’re taking them off of their “short-term road map” (9 months).
Here is a list of the 32/39 nodes, which are run by huge corporations. It reminds me of the circle that the Libra Association tried to launch Meta’s digital currency before it was vehemently rejected by the market…
You essentially need a supercomputer in a data center to run a node on Hedera. Specs for nodes include a 24-core CPU, 320GB DDR4 RAM, 7.5TB of SSD NVMe storage. What is the point of all of this if we're just going to rely and trust huge corporations, shortlisted into a cartel for us? I'm disappointed in Hedera for giving up on decentralization, but somewhere along the line we’ve always known that Hedera was designed for huge corporations, not us.
The thread where Hedera acknowledges removal of community nodes from their road map can be found here:
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