What do you think of Ethereum's dark forest law?

Original title: "Viewpoint | How to view the dark forest law of Ethereum? "

Original source: Crypto Valley Live

Ethereum's permissionless nature comes at a price -- but it is necessary and beneficial.

Summary

Ethereum The technology, community and governance are all permissionless - 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.

Introduction 

Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos in their "Ethereum is a Dark Forest" article compares Ethereum's adversarial environment to the concept of a "dark forest". The metaphor comes from a book of the same name, and is used to describe "an environment in which being found means certain death at the hands of high-ranking predators".

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 end states. If profitable, they will ruthlessly "hack" these transactions for profit.

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.

A few examples.

Technology: Deploy to mainnet, add state to chain, monitor mempool to pre-empt.

Community: Participate in the community, trend on Twitter, donate to the Gitcoin Foundation.

Governance: lobbying for or opposing specific technological changes, participation in consensus, call for participation in all core developments.

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 the design is by itself . 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.

Embrace the dark forest feature of Ethereum 

Worth remembering Interestingly, in just 5 years, Ethereum has become a:

A collection of emerging technical, community, and governance characteristics that is more common in any other ecosystem cannot be copied.

Through a growing open mechanism, anyone can conduct permissionless creative experimentation.

With the nature of decentralization and distribution, any organization or individual can participate.

These amazing properties, all in one ecosystem! All of these are the result of Ethereum's origin and growth as a dark forest ecosystem: permissionless, chaotic , 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.

What does Ethereum achieve 

We've seen people from all over the world take advantage of Ethereum's capabilities. As Virgil said: "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 enables

-anyone can create or Open organizations to join

-transparent transaction records

-global financial products and markets

-community currency

-remittances

-Non-custodial financial services

-A marketplace for fairly compensating givers

-Persistent scripts that can be deployed on computers globally.

-identity like everyone else

-financialization of other things

-multinational corporations coordinate local resource extraction

When expectations diverge from reality 

In this list, It has both very good development potential and potential disadvantages. If we are overwhelmed by negative outcomes, it may sometimes feel like Ethereum isn’t worth our while.

This summer's yield farming events have once again highlighted the divisions in the community. On one side are prominent voices raising concerns about the speed of experimentation, calls for "The DAO" and ICO mania. On the other hand, a celebration of radical experimentation and participation in these experimental projects.

The community contains different perspectives on how fast and in what way the ecosystem should evolve. It is crucial to understand that this is the latest manifestation of an old pattern that will continue as long as blocks are produced. There will still be frantic, rampant speculation in the future to affect Ethereum's capacity.

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 strip collective meaning out of our individual frameworks — not least by pushing gas fees higher.

There are countless different communities at all three levels (technical, community, governance) . They have very different end goals for Ethereum, but they all want to leverage its dark forest capabilities.

They may try to leverage the community and governance layers to gain support or funding, or even divert valuable projects attention. 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.

What can the community do?  

At each level, we need to better accept the reality of the dark forest. We need to play the long game with our opposing mentality.

We need to understand that we share every layer with both aligned and non-aligned people. We need to embrace — or rather tolerate — an uncertain, seemingly unstable, permissionless ecosystem.

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, welcome to the Dark Forest!

We all To build this as a community. 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. This is how it should be, and it is our ability to negotiate between these two poles that makes me as hopeful as ever that what we are building together will continue to materialize .

Overall 

Ethereum has always been A confrontational environment. Its dark forest feature is what makes it unique compared to all other crypto platforms and communities. Because Ethereum's technology, community, and governance layers are permissionless, anyone can use and abuse them. We cannot control this access, but we make our choices.

In times of rapid change, we must remind ourselves of the fundamental reasons why we started in the first place. We should redouble our efforts and recommit ourselves to nurturing Ethereum’s dark forest. After all, the positive results are still significant.

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