Intensive reading and analysis of V God's new book "Proof of Stake" (2)
Book chapter
Book chapter
abstract
abstract
This book is to introduce the author Vitalik Buterin (V God).
God worked as an editor for Bitcoin in the early days. After years of research, interviews, and writing, he founded Ethereum.
There will be conflicts between utopia and dystopia in Ethereum at present and in the future for a long time.
Translator's point of view
Translator's point of view
Narrative economics tells us that history is always similar. To achieve large-scale commercial application of a new technology, multiple factors such as narrative, technology, capital, policy, and opportunity are needed to promote success. To sort out and summarize the Internet history of WEB2 , we will also see the shadow of technology, capital, policy, based on these factors. The interrelationship between these factors is that the narrative is the lead, and the corresponding funds, technology and other factors must be developed and promoted around the narrative. Relatively speaking, a good narrative can be bigger and longer, and it is closer to changing the world. Therefore, for the development trend of WEB3, it is necessary for us to review the history with awe.
What makes V God different is that he broke the existing economic and technical thinking framework, had a new thinking about the future, and pointed out the direction. These are in his persistent pursuit of decentralization, ideals rather than profits. The pursuit has been verified again and again. Therefore, a more comprehensive and profound understanding of V God's thoughts on stories and technologies will help us obtain greater dividends of the times. However, premature pursuit of profit and abandonment of ideals often fail to reach the end. Jobs and Peter Thiel gave positive cases on this point.
One of the differences between Eastern thinking and Western philosophical thinking lies in the starting point and ending point of thinking. Many people with Eastern thinking stop thinking after the problem is solved, and do not start thinking to solve the problem; Philosophy The thinking of thinking is more derived from fun and retreat thinking, so there will be some "useless" retreats in the early days, just like the exploration of atomism in BC, the assumptions and demonstrations of geometry and mathematics, these in the In the early stage, it did not produce actual production value and joy of life. Alluding to the blockchain field, technological innovation is far more than simply realizing DEFI, GAMEFI, and NFT digital treasures. Utopian retreat thinking will bring us more and more valuable inventions.
secondary title
Brief translation of the content (partial translation, the order has been adjusted)
This book is to introduce the author V God.
Before Vitalik Buterin started creating a new internet-based economic infrastructure at 19 and became a billionaire, he slept on a friend's sofa. His father immigrated to Canada from Russia when he was a child. With the encouragement and encouragement of his father, God became interested in Bitcoin.
During the global economic turmoil in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto announced the prototype of Bitcoin for the first time, with the goal of establishing a currency constructed by an encrypted computer network, rather than issued by the government and banks. Libertarian gold investors and cypherpunks started carousing about mining, limited supply, and secure and private transactions.
In 2011, rather than buying, borrowing, or mining the first bitcoin, he would rather post on an online forum asking if someone would pay him bitcoin to support his writing of bitcoin content. At Bitcoin Magazine, he continues to write about Bitcoin's small-scale technical developments. During this period, God V continued to conduct interviews and dialogues with other people. Bitcoin, a new Internet fund, is difficult to use, but it has always attracted his attention.
At the end of 2013, when most people were still keen on the carnival of mining, V God was more obsessed with the blockchain technology applied at the bottom of Bitcoin technology, and he realized that there would be something bigger: a way to create organizations, companies way, as well as the native economy of the Internet. V God wrote for many years through blogs, forums, twitter, etc., and then he showed his invention-Ethereum. If Ethereum and its counterparts are to become ubiquitous infrastructure, Vitalik's perspective needs to be understood and broadly challenged. That same year he wrote the ethereum white paper, igniting the still-small cryptocurrency world, where user autonomy is the default, rather than reliance on old-world conglomerates, investors, and laws. Bitcoin means gold and mining, while Ethereum has set off a culture of T-shirts, robots, unicorns, and rainbows as mascots.
Since Ethereum launched in 2015, many competitors have been established, but Ethereum has always been the biggest one. While the price of ETH is always second, all the products and community tokens of the Ethereum ecosystem have taken up the lion's share of this strange new economy.
In this process, God V has gradually become the "benevolent dictator" of Ethereum, which also makes God V fall into a contradiction. He wants to trigger a radical reimagining of how humans organize themselves, while being agnostic about how people wield this power. Credible neutrality is one of the design principles of the Ethereum system, yet he plays the role of leader. Despite his best efforts, from the early Ethereum Foundation decisions to the most recent high-stakes escalation (MERGE escalation), it was extremely difficult for him to separate his leadership role for Ethereum from Ethereum. The design of the Ethereum system is based on the fact that human nature is selfish, and he is an ascetic who does not profit for himself. This is not the direction of empowering encryption rights.
There's no guarantee this will lead to a future worth owning, and before the end of his Bitcoin conference in Miami in early 2014, he eloquently presented everything that can be built with Ethereum, which also ended with the movie Terminator's Skynet . Ethereum contains both utopian and dystopian sides:
It establishes artificial scarcity by limiting the total amount of tokens; but it also allows the community to create a large amount of usable and controllable capital.
It shuts out people who cannot buy and trade high-risk online currencies; but in terms of governance systems, it also inspires unprecedented innovation in fully sharing rights.
It consumes vast amounts of energy to maintain its function in perpetuity; but it can also provide a price for carbon emissions and pollution, something governments refuse to do.
It created upstarts notorious for their profligacy, who clustered in tax havens and created local overpricing.
It rewards some of the tech elite for early entry; it also presents a real opportunity to gradually erode the dominance of the tech giants.
It creates a speculative financial system before real economic value is generated; however, compared to the stock market, the person who creates the value owns this network.
It spews out a flood of apparently worthless digital collectibles; yet it is also a new business model of open creation and sharing.
It can make the first mover rich at the expense of the latecomer; at the same time, the latecomer also gets the content created by the first mover.
Readers must keep these contradictions in mind and wrestle with them, figuring out winning options for themselves and their communities. Contradictions can be vexing and painful, but they can also be encouraging.
Ethereum evokes the labor, commitment, faith, and coordination these essays portray. But they also embody contradictions: innovation and waste, democracy and plutocracy, vibrant communities and relentless mistrust. Like the mechanics themselves, these metaphors resist idealism, pointing out the compromises necessary to realize the desired world through the real world.
background supplement
background supplement
At the heart of any blockchain-based system such as Bitcoin or Ethereum is the consensus mechanism. It’s the process by which computers come to an agreement on a common set of data and protect it from manipulation — whether it’s a list of transactions, like in Bitcoin, or the state of the ethereum world computer. Consensus without a central authority is not easy. Bitcoin uses a mechanism called "proof of work," which means that many computers spend a lot of energy solving mathematical problems, all in order to prove that they are invested in keeping the system secure. The people behind these computers, known as "miners," are paid as such to consume electricity on a national scale, generating the carbon emissions required for consumption levels. Proof of Work was also adopted by Ethereum as a functional alternative was lacking at the time. But even before going live, Buterin has been talking about switching, and once his team has figured it out, moving to another mechanism: proof of stake. In Proof-of-Stake, users prove their in-game skin through token holdings rather than computing power. Energy consumption is minimal. If token holders try to disrupt the system, they lose their staked tokens.
