Vitalik Reiterates Ethereum's Mission: Reduce Vulnerability to External Dependencies Through Resilience, Empowering People with Sovereignty

BlockBeats News, January 6th, Ethereum founder Vitalik published a post reiterating the purpose of Ethereum, stating that "the creation of Ethereum was not to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to give people freedom." This is an important and controversial statement in the "Trustless Manifesto," which deserves a reexamination and a better understanding of its meaning. The words "efficient" and "convenient" imply improving the average case in a situation that is already quite good. Efficiency refers to having the world's best engineers invest their souls to reduce latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or to increase the yield from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience means allowing people to click once instead of three times, reducing registration time from 1 minute to 20 seconds. These things may be nice to have, but we must understand that we can never outcompete Silicon Valley's corporate players in this game.

Therefore, the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different one. This game is about resilience. Resilience is not about comparing 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY; it is about minimizing the risk of experiencing -100% APY. Resilience is if you become politically unpopular and get blacklisted, or if your app developer goes bankrupt or disappears, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if a cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency remains at 2000ms. Resilience ensures that anyone in the world can access the Ethereum network and be a first-class participant anywhere.

Resilience is sovereignty, in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" — actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies that could be arbitrarily revoked at any time. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless, and resilient block space — and then make it rich.