It has been known for years that it was not a truely decentralised currency, ironically enough, they probably had some good foresight to retain that auth node.
I hardly think that it's "good foresight" for a cryptocurrency to retain properties of centralized systems - unless you're saying that I have even better foresight by keeping all of my savings in fiat currency in the US financial system, which gives me all sorts of convenient properties like rollbacks and legal protections and FDIC insurance.
NO! Absolutely not! They should let the network govern itself because thats one of the main differentiators (for better or worse) of crypto.
This always happens with crypto - there's a hack, some people lose money and then the community vibe goes out the window and there's software patches, transactional rollback attempts, network forks, and so on.
Part of the risk of a decentralised autonomous system is that it's DECENTRALISED AND AUTONOMOUS. If you lose money because of a hack THATS PART OF YOUR RISK PROFILE. DEAL WITH IT.
Having a centralized node with a single authority mitigates some of the uncomfortableness of the original hack, and might get some or all of the money back - but the cost of that is undermining the entire network ethos. This currency is a single issuing authority who can dictate the rules when it suits them and pull the plug if things get uncomfortable.
You guys realise that all crypto currencies can be programmed with rollbacks and shit using hard forks if they do find an extreme zero day exploit or something? The only difference between the decentralised ones and the centralised ones is that no one can actually stop a compromised chain from functioning while they deploy a hard fork.
You can wake up one day to a severe ECDS bug and bitcoin will have to rollback anything that gets compromised afterwards (assuming it isn't a bug that makes the scheme trivially crackable and hence invalidates everything from the genesis block) as they patch up the software. It's not an unforeseen problem. You have to rely on the fact that the attackers also don't compromise your media outreach capabilities so you have no way of informing the world that the chain is no longer secure.
If you set up a libertarian community in which everything is privatized, and then one day your home catches on fire, but you don't pay for firefighting service, it sucks to be you, but is your neighbor* going to just say "that's part of your risk profile, deal with it"? Laws and philosophies are one thing, but there are predictions you can make about the actions of people separate from that, and so your rules and abstractions have to be compatible.
I mean, governments can collapse, fiat currency can fail, financial regulation can be corrupted, so it's entirely possible in ten years everybody will be using cryptocurrency, because everything else has gone to hell.
In general I don't believe in trying to hedge against everything going wrong. I want to be rich in the future where money can buy, say, immortality or space travel, not in the Mad Max future where money just makes you a target.
I think this criticism is a bit off. We can see that there are places in the world today where the government and financial systems are really fucked, but people do use crypto, so it is conceivable that sort of situation will spread and take over the developed world. But it would be the new dark ages, not a glorious future. If it did happen, my hope is that like everything these days it would happen faster and be over sooner.
Lol, not a "true decentralized currency" is sort of like saying north korea is not a "true democratic republic". Technically true but also misleading because the phrasing implies its sort of close to being there.
The IOTA Foundation has claimed to be working on removing their central coordinator since at least late 2018 [1]. As the expression goes, "rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated".
