BlockBeats News: On January 6, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin reiterated Ethereum's purpose in a post, stating, "Ethereum was not created to make finance more efficient or to make applications more convenient, but to give people freedom." This is a significant and controversial statement from the "Trustless Manifesto," one that is worth re-examining to better understand its meaning. Words like "efficiency" and "convenience" imply improving the average case in situations that are already quite good. Efficiency means having the world's best engineers pour their souls into reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing yield from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience means making it so users only need to click once instead of three times, reducing registration time from one minute to 20 seconds. These things may be nice to do, but we must understand that we can never outcompete Silicon Valley's corporate players in this game.
Therefore, the fundamental underlying game that Ethereum is playing must be a different game. This game is resilience. Resilience is not about comparing a 4.5% APY versus a 5.3% APY, but rather about minimizing the risk of experiencing a -100% APY. Resilience means that even if you become politically unpopular and get censored, or your application developers go bankrupt or disappear, or Cloudflare goes down, or a cyberwar on the internet erupts, your 2000-millisecond latency still remains at 2000 milliseconds. In a resilient world, anyone, anywhere, can access the network and become a first-class participant.
Resilience is sovereignty—sovereignty in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—proactively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies, which can be arbitrarily revoked at any time. This is the kind of game Ethereum is well-suited to win. First and foremost, Ethereum must be a decentralized, permissionless, and resilient blockchain space—and only then can it become rich and robust.