Yes many articles are not academic but the trend is reversing, as it has been with blockchains in general for some years. I think this pattern appears when the concepts are still immature, we see this in many innovations like DeFi or NFTs for example.
Concerning your question about conclusions, Ethereum and Bitcoin are mainly used as 2 references to execute such comparisons. Without taking any position, most publications show that Bitcoin is more “decentralized” than Ethereum on most of the used metrics. I will try to summarize some of the findings from the Notable Works list:
This article concludes that over time, ETH and BTC nodes tend to centralize, they also provide some comparison such as :
This research concludes that Bitcoin is 27.3% more decentralized than Ethereum concerning block mined (and 16.5% concerning address balance).
In this one they conclude that ‘the degree of decentralization in Bitcoin is higher, while the degree of decentralization in Ethereum is more stable’ according to their multiple metrics and granularities:
- ‘Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum tends to be more stable but less decentralized in terms of the measurements of the Shannon entropy.’
- ‘Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum tends to be less decentralized, as revealed by the results of the Nakamoto coefficient.’
- ‘Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum tends to be significantly less decentralized in terms of the measurements of the Gini coefficient, which might be affected by the huge difference of the block production rates between Bitcoin and Ethereum.’
They conclude that, according to their metrics and data from 2016/2017:
- ‘Bitcoin has a higher capacity network than Ethereum,but with more clustered nodes likely in datacenters’ , ‘Ethereum nodes are geographically further apart than Bitcoin’.
- ‘In Ethereum, the block rewards have less variance than Bitcoin’s.’
- ‘Ethereum has a lower mining power utilization than Bitcoin, likely due to the high block frequency.’ There are more pruned blocks in Ethereum which means the power is, in a sense, less efficiently used than in Bitcoin (but they recognize that their data may be incomplete).
