Vitalik: A trusted neutral mechanism is the core of a system
Editor's Note: This article comes fromFirst Class Warehouse (ID: first_vip1), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
First Class Warehouse (ID: first_vip1)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
This article was published by Vitalik Buterin on NAKAMMOTO on January 3, 2020. The translation is provided by First.Vip, and the translation has been deleted.
People are sometimes dissatisfied with the direct decision of developers to distribute tokens to some people, but they are not dissatisfied with the mining rewards distributed to miners in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
People will be dissatisfied with social platforms reviewing and blocking some political content, but they will not be disturbed by punishing drivers who violate Didi's rules.
In this context, Vitalik believes that there is a very important principle at play: When establishing mechanisms to determine high-stakes outcomes, these mechanisms must be credibly neutral.
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Mechanism: algorithm + incentive
In essence, the mechanism is an algorithm + incentive, a tool that introduces the values of decision makers. In a well-functioning mechanism, people can be guided to produce the results that are effective and the mechanism creators want, and they are incentivized to make people participate "honestly".
Here are some examples of mechanisms:
Social media: likes control more people can see this piece of content, while disapproval and blocking reduce it.
The PoW and PoS mechanism of the blockchain: Miners and participants decide whether the longest chain is compliant, and rewards are used to encourage correct behavior.
We are entering a hyper-networked, hyper-intermediated and rapidly evolving information age where centralized institutions are losing public trust and people are looking for alternatives. Therefore, we need a different form of mechanism.
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Essentially, if you look at the design of the mechanism, it does not discriminate against or against any particular group of people, then the mechanism is absolutely neutral. "Anyone who mines a block will get 2 ETH" is absolutely neutral; "Bob wrote a lot of code, he should be rewarded" is not neutral; "a post flagged as bad by five people will not Shown" is credible neutrality.
In real life, it is difficult to achieve complete neutrality. Anyone who digs out a block will get the same amount of rewards, but it is more beneficial to those who live in areas with cheap electricity and have cheap mining machines. A neutral mechanism treats everyone fairly, so that most people can trust this mechanism. The identity of a miner is easy to verify, but it is more difficult to define whether a person is a developer or has made a great contribution. Therefore, the focus of the neutral mechanism is not on neutrality, but on reliable neutrality. That is to say, the mechanism must be designed so that most people have basically the same pay/price. Give up easily with this mechanism.
In other words, what we need are common sense concepts, or broad legitimacy, rationality that can be stated in less mathematical terms. In order to achieve this common sense of neutrality (that is, the common sense that everyone thinks that the mechanism is public), the publicity of the mechanism must be very obvious.
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Establish a credible neutral mechanism
There are four main rules for establishing a credible neutral mechanism:
Don't write specific people or specific outcomes into the mechanism
Open Source and Publicly Verifiable Execution
keep things simple
don't change often
Ease of understanding: the rules of the mechanism should be public, and it should be possible to publicly verify that the rules are enforced correctly. In many cases, users do not want the input to be publicly visible, then the combination of zero-knowledge proof and blockchain can achieve both verifiability and privacy.
The simpler the mechanism, and the fewer parameters the mechanism has, the less room there is to insert hidden privileges for or against the target group.
Don't change mechanics too often. Changing too often can lead to a loss of trustworthiness.
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Beyond Neutrality: Efficacy Matters, Too
The opposite of credible neutrality is the pursuit of extreme neutrality: if it is not completely public, it cannot be implemented.
The fallacy of this view is that narrow neutrality is achieved at the expense of broad neutrality. The mechanism can guarantee that each miner is under the same rules as every other miner, 12.5 BTC or 2 ETH per block, but the contribution of miners cannot exceed that of developers. If we adopt uncompromising narrow-sense pure neutralism, other needs of the community will not be supported by the system at all, and neutrality in a broad sense will not be achieved.
Therefore, the principle of credible neutrality must also be extended by the principle of effectiveness. A good mechanism must also be able to solve real problems. Failure to do so exposes mechanism makers to criticism. If a reliable neutral mechanism is not found to solve the problem, the imperfect neutral mechanism will be used first in the short term. Blockchain pre-sales and developer rewards for a certain period of time are imperfect examples of temporary adoption in the short term. The other is that when a decentralized method has not been adopted, a centralized method must be used for detection. Nevertheless, we must realize the value of trusted neutrality and gradually realize it.
If there is concern that incomplete neutrality will lead to a loss of trust, this can be supplemented by a "fail-safe" approach. People can add event limits, rewards will disappear after the limited time, must be updated. People can implement this mechanism in Layer2 (rollup or ETH 2 execution environment) to achieve network effect locking. If this mechanism is out of balance, it can be abandoned through coordination.
A credible neutral mechanism for solving problems exists in theory, and needs to be developed and perfected in practice.
reputation system.
The biggest challenge now is to make mechanisms both open and yet resistant to attack, but the development of cryptography that allows open rules while keeping verifiable execution and outputs and inputs private will make this easier.
In principle, we know that it is entirely possible to establish rules with trusted neutrality - and as mentioned above, we have basically done so in most cases. But as the number of software-intermediated (software intermediary) markets on which we depend grows, it becomes paramount to ensure that these systems do not empower the few—whether it be operator platforms or service providers—that we create trustworthy The rules of the letter system are supported by anyone.
