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Blockchain isn’t as decentralized as you think: Defense agency report

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum may be more vulnerable to centralization risks than initially thought, according to Trail of Bits.  The security firm on Tuesday released its report titled “Are Blockchains Decentralized?”, which was commissioned by the U.S. Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The report aims to investigate whether blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum are truly decentralized, though the report appeared to focus largely on Bitcoin. Among its key findings, the security firm found that outdated Bitcoin nodes, unencrypted blockchain mining pools and a majority of unencrypted Bitcoin network traffic traversing over only a limited number of ISPs could leave room for various actors to garner e...