Vitalik Restates Ethereum's Mission: Reduce External Dependency Vulnerability Through Resilience, Empowering Sovereignty

BlockBeats News, January 6th, Ethereum founder Vitalik published a post reiterating Ethereum's purpose, "The creation of Ethereum was not meant to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to give people freedom." This is an important and controversial statement from the "Trust Minimized Manifesto," which deserves a reexamination for a better understanding of its meaning. Words like "efficient" and "convenient" imply improving the average case scenario in a situation that is already quite good. Efficiency refers to having the world's best engineers put their souls into reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds or increasing the yield from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience means enabling people to click once instead of three times, reducing registration time from 1 minute to 20 seconds. These things may be done well. But we must understand that we can never outplay Silicon Valley's corporate players in this game.

Therefore, the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. This game is about resilience. Resilience is not about comparing 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY, but about minimizing the risk of you facing -100% APY. Resilience is if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or your app developer goes bankrupt or disappears, or Cloudflare goes down, or there is an internet-scale war, your 2000-millisecond latency still stays at 2000 milliseconds. Resilience is a world where anyone, anywhere can access the network and be a first-class participant.

Resilience is sovereignty, it is sovereignty in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies that can be arbitrarily stripped away at any time, which is the game Ethereum is suited to win. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless, and resilient in the block space—and then make it rich.