Opinion: What do you think of Ethereum's dark forest law?
Editor's Note: This article comes fromCrypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)Editor's Note: This article comes from
, Author: Trenton Van Epps, translation: Li Hanbo, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Summary
Summary
introduce
Ethereum is permissionless in terms of technology, community, and governance—meaning anyone can access these layers. While this openness comes at a cost to the community, it is what makes Ethereum such a large and dynamic ecosystem. We must always keep this reality in mind and not get distracted by what we are building, a global arena where collaboration is paramount."secondary title"introduce"Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos in their"Ethereum is a dark forest"In this paper, Ethereum's adversarial environment is compared with"。
concepts were compared. This metaphor comes from a book of the same name and is used to describe
In one setting, being found means certain death at the hands of high-level marauders
It more vividly describes the Ethereum mempool, which is a virtual space for pending transactions waiting to be included in a block. The mempool is closely monitored by bots of unknown origin who monitor transactions and their potential closing status. If profitable, they will relentlessly "stalk" these transactions for profit.
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Every layer of Ethereum is a dark forest
In what follows, I extend the dark forest metaphor to also include other technical aspects of Ethereum, as well as its community and governance layers. Just as anyone can observe transactions in the mempool to exploit, arbitrageurs can exploit each layer to their ultimate benefit, whether or not they have the long-term interests of the community in mind.
Give a few examples.
Technology: Deploy to the main network, add state to the chain, monitor the mempool to preemptively strike.
Governance: Lobbying or opposing specific technical changes, participating in consensus, participating in calls for all core development.
When this happens, it feels like someone else is using infrastructure for free that they didn't contribute to. If they are other community members, because of their abuse, these infrastructures that could be better will be dragged down by them.
While the permissionless nature of Ethereum affects every layer, we must remember that this design is by its very nature. In fact, an economic ecosystem is more worrisome if no one invests in it, which leads to less interesting projects in the end. We're lucky that that hasn't happened yet. This current feature is revolutionary for Ethereum and deserves our continued investment.
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Embracing Ethereum’s dark forest features
It is worth remembering that in just 5 years, Ethereum has become a:
A collection of emerging technical, community and governance characteristics that cannot be replicated in any other ecosystem
With the nature of decentralization and distribution, any organization or individual can participate.
These amazing properties, all in one ecosystem! All are a result of Ethereum's origin and growth as a dark forest ecosystem: permissionless, chaotic, and open to all.
These attributes have the same rights as one of the Ethereum community's favorite frameworks - retail investors and giants. Both retail investors and dark forests are sources of continuous energy for the community. Anyone, from any background and any country, has access to what we're developing - and that's a powerful motivation for us to keep working."secondary title"What Ethereum achieves
We've seen people from all over the world take advantage of Ethereum's capabilities. As Virgil puts it:
Ethereum is an arena for playing cooperative games like never before
. An arena full of coordinated machines: No matter what happens in the physical world, tools and infrastructure continue to function. In a truly believable neutral fashion, these coordination machines can be used for any purpose: from the inspirational to the commonplace, from the mundane to the evil.
Again, it's worth reminding that Ethereum uses
Transparent transaction records
money transfer
Global financial products and markets
community currency
money transfer
Non-custodial financial services
A market that fairly compensates givers
same identity as others
financialization of other things
Multinational corporations coordinate local resource extraction
secondary title"The DAO "When Expectations Contradict Reality
In this list, there are both very good development potential and potential disadvantages. If we are overwhelmed by negative outcomes, it may sometimes feel like Ethereum is not worth the effort.
Yield farming events this summer once again highlighted the divisions in the community. On one side were prominent voices raising concerns about the speed of the experiment, and the
The call and the frenzy of ICO. On the other hand, a celebration of radical experimentation and participation in these experimental projects.
It all boils down to Molochs: opportunistic monsters that live with us in the forest with the sole purpose of perpetuating the failure of coordination (Meditations on Moloch). Manias like yield farming introduce uncertainty into our expectations, upend norms, and take collective meaning out of our individual frameworks — especially by pushing gas fees higher.
A myriad of different communities exist across all three layers (technical, community, governance). They have very different end goals for Ethereum, but they both want to leverage its Dark Forest abilities.
They may try to leverage the community and governance layers to gain support or funding, or even divert attention from worthy projects. Some of these end up having negative long-term ecosystem or regulatory impacts. Some will fan their own fanaticism, and some will fan the core community, causing confusion about what are worthy goals and how to pursue them. Given the permissionless access to technology and the malleability of social and political layers, it is impossible to predict or prevent every possibility.
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What can the community do?
At every level, we need to better accept the reality of the dark forest. We need to play the long game with our opposing mentality.
Do we believe there are still worthwhile technical, community and governance experiments on Ethereum? Then we have to better accept reality.
Most people are profit driven. But you need to focus on maintaining your resolve until the mechanics you value are valued by others. Not just others in the ecosystem - but the rest of the planet as a whole, welcome to Dark Forest!
We need to build this as a community, now and in the future. This is a massive collective experiment. Forest requires diverse interests, backgrounds, and skills as inputs to craft its cooperative play and coordination machines. It requires some to play it safe and others to push it. That's how it should be, and it's our ability to negotiate between these two poles that makes me as hopeful as ever that what we're building together will continue to materialize.
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