The real competitive advantage of Ethereum: ideology is an irreplaceable core competitiveness

Recently, there was such a hot topic on Weibo.

I think people should go to Beijing for a few years in their life, preferably to go to university and study in Beijing. Of course, not only because of its profound cultural heritage and educational resources, but also because it is a city that can improve the happiness of life.

That is, as long as you have lived in Beijing, you will feel happier than living in Beijing in any other city in the future.

A friend who lives in Dabieye in other places is also very puzzled, why so many people insist on crowding in Beijing, a big rural area, expensive prices, traffic congestion, high pressure, and people's hostility. The high price of 100,000 per square meter...

I think what they say makes sense. For ordinary individuals, it is true that Beijing is not that friendly, but this is not the whole picture.

For other people, Beijing is a paradise. No matter how high the housing prices are, they will not leave, or they cannot leave, because there are things that other cities do not have.

Shanghai and Shenzhen are equally developed, and even develop faster in some fields, and the cost of living is lower; Chengdu and Hangzhou are developing rapidly in mobile games, e-commerce, Internet celebrity economy, etc., and have a comfortable environment... But from a macro perspective, they Neither can replace Beijing, nor can it surpass Beijing.

Beijing is the ideological center of China.

Ideology is a plausible way of explaining the world. It gives people identity, dignity and morality. In times of crisis, people can transcend real interests and unite everyone.

This is the urban core that cannot be replaced by all modern high-rise buildings.

So if you can understand this, then you can also try to understand the competitive advantages of Ethereum and Layer 2 when faced with new public chains that are faster and cheaper, as well as various side chains:

In the smart contract war, ideology is the real core competitiveness.

To understand DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), you should have heard the book "Starfish and Spiders". In the author's opinion, the starfish of the decentralized network is far more powerful than the spider of the centralized structure.

The spider, its intelligence is concentrated in the brain, as long as you remove the head of the spider, the spider will die; and the decentralized organization is like a starfish, the starfish has no head at all, its intelligence is distributed throughout the body, once you kill it Part of its body, that part may even grow itself into another starfish, so killing a starfish is much harder than killing a spider.

They describe decentralized networks as having 5 important properties, one of which is ideology.

What attracts members to the organization? Not just because things are available for free, but ideology, and ideology is the glue that sticks with these kinds of organizations.

Since the beginning of Bitcoin, in the world of cryptocurrency, there is only one core ideology——Decentralization, decentralization.

All altcoins trying to challenge the status of Bitcoin have failed, because they belong to the ideology of Bitcoin. Simply relying on computing power, capital, slogans... cannot pose a threat to the purchase of Bitcoin, and the same is true for the public chain battlefield.

"Ethereum killers" emerge in endlessly, all trying to use higher efficiency, lower cost, and user-friendliness as the main narrative line to dismantle the advantages of Ethereum, but the advantages in efficiency are essentially at the expense of decentralization.

For example, some public chains have a set of strict hardware requirements for becoming a verification node; some public chains have fewer nodes; some public chain verification nodes mostly belong to their stakeholders...

decentralized"decentralized"Efficiency is the most cost-effective approach. Reducing the number of nodes or centralizing verifiers may not be completely decentralized, but while achieving increased efficiency and low cost, it has also achieved a certain level of decentralization, so why not do it?

There is some truth to that argument, but it doesn't win them out.

Ethereum has something that other public chains can’t tout — a strong commitment to the ideology of decentralization. At the peak of Ethereum, about 12,000 nodes do not require special hardware to participate, and most of them are not controlled by the Ethereum Foundation.

True believers will not compromise and tolerate decentralization in pursuit of speed and low cost. This uncompromising belief in ideology is driving a lot of innovation.

Because we have seen Layer 2, if there is no insistence on decentralization ideology, then Layer 2 does not seem necessary to exist, sacrificing decentralization, naturally faster efficiency can be obtained, such as various side chains.

DeFi is also an ideological choice. For example, some purists or top DeFi protocols refuse to develop any applications on networks other than Ethereum. This persistence has greatly widened the moat of the Ethereum network.

In the East and the West, there are also differences in the adherence to ideology. Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, said in an interview at the end of last year,“In the U.S. and Europe, people talk about blockchain and focus more on ideology, about freedom, decentralization and open source. In Asia, people pay more attention to applications and like to discuss cryptocurrencies and projects that use tokens to do things.”

All new public chains trying to challenge Ethereum must realize that,Technological progress is actually the easiest, while ideological transcendence is the hardestHowever, if you only challenge Ethereum based on the ideology established by Ethereum, then you can only become a "satellite city" in the end, taking over the traffic overflow of Ethereum.

In the same way, it is still difficult for Ethereum to challenge Bitcoin at present, because the entire decentralized ideology is established by Bitcoin. In terms of pragmatism, Ethereum is a hundred times that of Bitcoin, but in terms of ideology , Ethereum is in a subordinate state.

But in addition to the ideology of decentralization, Ethereum is still developing its own ideology.

Ethereum is usually defined as a shared world computer, which is the infrastructure, how to organize and apply depends on the individual,Ethereum is not an advocate of anarchism and is not in the business of fighting states。

In terms of political and economic philosophy, Ethereum is closest to Eric A. Posner and E. Glenn Weil's "radical market" theory:To expand the market more radically and use the power of the market itself to improve the market。

Vitalik felt a lot after reading "Radical Markets", and specially wrote the after-reading "On Radical Markets". In September 2018, Vitalik and Glenn Weil, one of the authors of "Radical Markets", jointly published a 40-page article "Liberal Radicalism: General Principles for the Way Social Public Goods Are Allocated."

Later, in many of Vitalik's ideas and the attempts of the Ethereum ecology, radical market theories can be seen, such as the Harborg tax and QV (quadratic voting).

The core rules of the Harbag tax are mainly: (1) publish a listed price for privately owned property, and submit a tax based on a certain percentage of this valuation every year; Buy this property in hand.

In terms of this rule, if the price is too high, you will have to pay more taxes; if the price is too low, others can easily buy your property, so that the trend price is at a reasonable stage. This is not relying on administrative power, but market games.

In 2019, Vitalik proposed the idea of ​​reshaping the ENS domain name transaction with Harborg tax. Later, at the ETHLondon Hackathon, a team used such a demo to win the first place in the ENS reward program.

For example, QV (Quadratic Voting) is essentially a new political economy discussion:Can market forces be used to price voting rights?

Can it be introduced into the market without relying on the majority system, that is, one person, one vote, which may lead to the tyranny of the majority, and does not rely on easy-to-manipulate methods such as representation (similar to focusing on swing states to get more electoral votes) The method, that is, the cost of the first vote of approval is 1 vote, and the cost of the second vote of approval becomes 4 votes (the second power of 2)?

Later, this idea found its way into the Ethereum ecosystem through Gitcoin’s quadratic funding mechanism, where smaller voters are matched by a larger pool to ensure that the distribution of infrastructure funding is diverse and reflective of the community as a whole wishes.

In general, the radical market affects Ethereum both in terms of worldview and methodology, which is also the key to the ideology that is different from Bitcoin.

After watching "The Age of Awakening", I feel that the struggle of ideology is the most fundamental struggle.The worst disintegration is the disintegration of ideology, and the greatest victory is the victory of ideology.

This is true for countries, cities, and even public chains.