Original title: "Ethereum's Hidden Worry｜Prophet Weekly #130"
Written by: A Jian
If I say that the current period is the period when Ethereum has received the most recognition and affirmation since its creation, I think no one will object. You may also remember how much doubt and contempt Ethereum has suffered in the past two years of 2018 and 2019. —— Of course, many of these doubts and contempt are unreasonable. For example, at that time many people thought that Ethereum was an ICO platform, but if this demand disappeared, the chain would be over.
It's interesting to me that in a little over two years, the fad of mocking Ethereum has turned into the fad of advocating it. Time really changes people, doesn't it? (Or should it be said that price changes people?)
What's even more interesting is that I'm in the minority in both the front and back vibes. Three years ago, I thought that Utility Token was on the wrong path. The most promising scenario of the blockchain is the so-called “DeFi” today—or in other words, the automation of financial activities. There will be no such technology as Ethereum prospect. (MakerDAO launched Sai at the end of 2017, Compound appeared in the middle of 2018, and Uniswap v1 was also launched at the end of 2018. It sounds magnificent, but it was not easy at the beginning.)
And today, I belong to those who have reservations about the prospects of Ethereum—even bluntly speaking, not appreciating it is far more than appreciating it. To make this clear, we have to start with the meaning of the word "Ethereum".
The word "Ethereum" is associated with several things at the same time:
It means a blockchain paradigm, which can be briefly summarized as "global state, on-chain computing, state-richness" and "multi-resource pricing"; its manifestation is an account model, a contract that can become part of the state on the chain, And the abstract unit of measurement Gas;
It means one (and most important) realization of this paradigm in the world today, the Ethereum blockchain, and of course it also means the embodiment of this chain in terms of economic value, ETH;
It means that the power and people who can adjust the details of this implementation are the ones who determine the direction of the underlying layer and determine its ability to survive and develop; that is, the governance procedures and participants of Ethereum; unfortunately, the current This program has shown signs of closure, and its main participant is the Ethereum Foundation.
The most prominent feature of the Ethereum paradigm is its versatility. You can write any code on Ethereum, and there is no hard limit on the number of executed codes, only the Gas Limit is the limit. This is also the source of the "combinability" that everyone talks about. Today's DeFi applications can flourish and evolve continuously, and composability is an important foundation.
But its disadvantage is that it requires the full node to keep a complete blockchain state locally, otherwise it cannot participate in the verification block. And these blockchain states are only increasing but not decreasing. Over time, the nominal overhead ratio of on-chain operations will be out of balance and push up the operating burden of the full node. (The "statelessness" and "state shelf life" that have been hotly discussed recently are efforts to solve this problem. The current preferred direction is "state shelf life", but from what I know, the currently proposed solutions It’s hard to describe, and far from being elegant and effective.)
That is to say, even just to solve this long-term survival problem, the Ethereum blockchain needs a set of governance procedures; not to mention that the participants of these governance procedures may also wish to add some functions and change some attributes.
This makes it impossible not to evaluate the prospects of the Ethereum blockchain based on the performance of these governance process participants.
Unfortunately, if the performance of the Ethereum Foundation is based on the performance of the past two years, I think they will get an embarrassing score. In 2018, Ethereum lowered the block reward, and the reason given by the EIP author was that "Ethereum has already given more to miners than Bitcoin (overpay)" (I still can't understand what the reason is). At the end of 2019, the "Istanbul" fork passed EIP-1884, which increased the gas consumption of several state access operation codes, which would break the usability of some contracts, but this EIP was still passed. There are elements of last resort, It is also considered that its impact is not as utilitarian as imagined; therefore, those projects that suffer from dumb losses have to deploy another contract (of course, these projects themselves cannot be said to be completely irresponsible, after all, no one has promised Gas Consumption will never change) (This year, the "Berlin" fork activated EIP-2930, and these broken contracts can be used in special ways again; I don't find this funny at all).
EIP-1559 is the same. No matter how many problems pointed out by the opponents, it cannot shake EF's determination to implement it. They seem to think that as long as there is no technical solution to the problem, it is not a problem; in other words, no matter how much the price is paid, it is not a problem. (Those who are interested can read "Why 1559" written by Tim Beiko to see how poor the economic literacy of today's Ethereum fork coordinators is.)
As for ETH2.0, let alone. Regarding the design of "sharding", how many rounds have you changed? (I came first, the number changed at least two rounds; fundamental design change at least once "execute sharding -> data sharding") Not to mention how insincere some people are in the PoW vs PoS debate up.
The underlying design cannot be stabilized, the monetary policy cannot be stabilized, the contract is occasionally broken, and large and unreasonable plans are frequently proposed to consume trust-this is the report card of EF in the past three years. Presumably someone enjoys this feeling of being pampered. No matter what wrong things he has done, someone will tell him that you don't have to worry, and you can go to school.
The fundamental reason is that EF has never regarded itself as a patch maintainer of this paradigm, and has never felt that its power should be limited. On the contrary, they are still able to convince themselves that "blockchain is the automation of social consensus", the implication is that as long as the social consensus is changed, the agreement can be changed; as for who knows what this mysterious "social consensus" is, Of course, some people's eyes can see things that we can't see. Is it very familiar?
What I've seen over the years is that there's no sign that they believe their power should be limited, that they agree that certain things shouldn't be done even if many people support them. Absolutely not. Instead, I just see them wielding that power arbitrarily, with contempt for others involved in the Ethereum blockchain. Just imagine, in the implementation of the Ethereum blockchain, apart from the things that are technically impossible, is there anything that the Ethereum Foundation wants to implement but cannot implement? My conclusion is no. As long as they dare not think or are not interested, there is nothing they cannot do. Does it make sense? nor.
Ethereum advertises itself as "off-chain governance", which means that it has no clear governance structure and procedures. But after you study carefully, you will find that it is not the same thing as Bitcoin's "off-chain governance". Bitcoin's off-chain governance is indeed very loose, but Ethereum's governance is in the middle of the "structured-unstructured" spectrum-on the one hand, its participants are not qualified for governance by explicit recognition and support , what can be implemented does not depend on such explicit support; but on the other hand, it is a governance with a roadmap, and there is an element among the participants that cannot be ignored. That is, the organization has already decided.
Contrary to what many people think, this problem cannot be improved by changing the way of participation in the governance process, because "where is the boundary of power" and "how is power organized" are two related issues that do not determine each other , which is the difference between what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty" (how far am I ruled) and "positive liberty" (who rules me).
But, how to put it - the two or three years that accumulated the current praise for Ethereum coincided with the two years (shall I say) when the vision of Ethereum's governance participants did not make much progress. A lot of great projects and work are built on the Ethereum paradigm itself, and have little to do with what EF does. I have hinted at this observation to others in the past two years.
For the same reason, I still have some goodwill and confidence in Ethereum as a technical paradigm, and this paradigm will undoubtedly continue to maintain the attractiveness and even greater success of the Ethereum blockchain and ETH . But I no longer feel that the important role in the current governance process of Ethereum is a group of trustworthy people. Also very pessimistic about the damage they might cause.
I believe that many people, like me, regarded Ethereum as the spiritual successor and development of Bitcoin at the beginning, because it makes the functions of the blockchain more generalized, making it easy to program and interact. Smart contracts become possible. But after a few years, people who have such thoughts must have a sense of disillusionment. It turns out that this system has fundamentally betrayed the spirit of Bitcoin, and it is impossible to change it.
Trusted third parties are security holes, and Ethereum is a bad example.
Finally, add two stories.
A friend of mine once said that TA thinks that Ethereum has opened up a space that everyone can live in, which is something that Bitcoin has not done. This sentence made me think about it for a long time, and I always remember it.
Another friend, I asked TA, what attributes do you like about Ethereum? When will you no longer be optimistic about ETH? TA said that there are many simple people like Vitalik in Ethereum, and they have strong creativity; if ETH cannot become more useful after the chaos, then TA will hesitate.
I think this is not only TA's answer. That's it, that's it. It turns out that innocence has always been us, right?
