The network itself is sufficiently decentralized. Smart contract risk is a risk though. However, many of the "hacks" have actually just been centralized exchanges, shitty bridge exploits, or rugpulls. Large, well funded, well run teams which have bug bounties have seen relatively few issues.

I am one of the people concerned about the growing centralization of Ethereum. L2s that are centralized. Stablecoins from tradfi companies. Cloud hosted nodes. Validation pools. VC money and increasing institutional presence. Etc.

However, Ethereum is still far and away more decentralized than anything out there. I can send and receive money, in seconds, with no bank or government to stop me.

You are absolutely right about the stablecoin risk, and I've been saying this for years, and many crypto folks have just ignored it. I was hoping to see stuff like RAI take off, but it just never did. It's ok to have valid criticisms of Ethereum that don't invalidate the entire ecosystem. The network will run forever, with or without stablecoins.

The latest hack was on a centralized tradfi platform: binance. This is not really crypto related at all, aside from the assets that were stolen.

The DAO hack you posted is also misinformation. People like to point to the DAO fork as proof that Ethereum is not immutable. But there are many nuances to this that are disingenuously ignored:

• Firstly, the DAO fork was not a rollback. It was a unique situation where the hackers had to wait 28 days for withdrawals, so a smart contract change was executed.

• There was strong consensus across developers, users, miners and community alike - it was hardly a centralized decision.

• Those who disagreed simply moved to Ethereum Classic. It's a win-win situation for all.

• Ethereum was still a very, very new project then. You know which other project did a rollback when it was less than 2 years old? Value overflow incident - Bitcoin.

• EIP-999 being rejected is the final deathblow to this hypothesis. There was a chance to rollback 500,000 ETH to an entity managed by one of its co-founders, and the community overwhelmingly rejected it. Rollbacks do not happen on Ethereum.

Additionally, people think Ethereum is centrally controlled. This simply is not true, although many have concerns about the increasing centralization (cloud hosted nodes, centralized stablecoins, etc).

While Vitalik remains an important part of the Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum development has become sufficiently decentralized over time. Unique to Ethereum is a multi-client approach, where researchers work with developers to create plain text specifications. These specifications are then implemented by multiple client developers who work independently. This is different to all other blockchain projects where the core team develops a single client. Now, of course, there are arguments for a single client - putting all resources into one client could make for a higher quality client than 4 or 5 not-as-high-quality client, but this is clearly the most decentralized approach. For example, there are currently 4 consensus layer clients in production, and 1 more in development - all developed by teams independent of the Ethereum Foundation (apart from receiving grants). For any consensus forks, these 5 development teams have to agree on upgrades, and then 135,000+ validators do as well. This is not how a centralized network functions. Not to mention Ethereum's strong "Layer 0" that all developers and validators listen to intently - its community. For example, EIP-1559 has been significantly motivated by the will of the community.