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From honeymoon to Rupture -- explore Nick Saab's change of heart on Ethereum

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How did Nick Saab, the man behind the idea of "smart contracts" and "bitgold", go from being an Ethereum supporter to a radical critic? By collecting saab's relevant comments and combining with important events in the history of Ethereum, the author sorts

From honeymoon to Rupture -- Exploring Nick Saab's changing attitude to Ethereum

The original author: Chester

Nick Szabo (1964 ~) is a computer scientist, jurist and cryptographer. Satoshi Nakamoto came up with the idea of a Bit Gold long before his bitcoin. The idea is considered one step away from inventing bitcoin. Saab was also the first to propose the concept of "smart contracts", which have been popularized by Ethereum. Saab was positive about Ethereum in the early years, but later became a vocal opponent of it. What happened that caused the cryptpunk to flip 180 degrees on Ethereum? This is the topic of this article. The author gathered by saab published in social media and other public comments, combined with the big event in the history of the development of Ethernet fang, combed the saab to ittai fang attitude change, may be a prelude to saab's negative attitude are analyzed, summarized the saab view the position of the etheric fang and his views on the etheric fang significance.

Saab's history with Ethereum

As early as 1994, Saab proposed the concept of smart contracts in his paper. He begins by saying:

, & have spent "Smart contracts are computerized trading agreements that enforce the terms of the contract. Smart contracts are designed to meet common contract scenarios, minimize vandalism and contingencies, and minimize the need for trusted intermediaries."

For a long time after the concept was proposed, smart contracts were just an idea, until blockchain came along. First, bitcoin scripts make smart contracts possible, but they are not Turing-complete and have limited applications. What really popularized smart contracts was Ethereum.

In 2013, Ethereum founder Vitalik adopted the concept of "smart contracts" in a white paper titled "Next Generation Smart Contracts and Decentralized Application Platforms". In honor of Saab, Vitalik named a unit of ethereum after "Szabo" (1 Ether = 1,000,000 Szabo), which can be said to honor saab as a living legend.

This is where the story of Saab and Ethereum begins.

Saab goes black on Ethereum fans

Positive Attitude (2014 ~ 2016?)

Saab was a strong supporter of Ethereum in its early days and had a good relationship with the ethereum community. In November 2015, he was also a guest at the Ethereum DEVCON1 event in London, where he gave a talk titled "Smart Contracts and Ethereum", showing his high expectations for the combination of Smart contracts and Ethereum.

Szabo has also lavished praise on Yifang in various public appearances, from tweets to podcasts. Such as:

On August 2, 2014, he tweeted:

, & have spent "Ethereum has the best idea in blockchain technology."

Speaking on a podcast in September 2015, he said:

, & have spent "Ethereum is a general-purpose computer. Bitcoin is a pocket calculator by comparison."

On February 14, 2016, he said in a twitter reply:

, & have spent "Most innovation breakthroughs start with seemingly unrealistic ideas, like the white papers for Bitcoin and Ethereum."

Negative attitude (2016? ~)

But at a later stage, especially in 2016 (the exact date will be discussed later), Saab's public comments on Ethereum on social media were all negative. Such as:

On June 5, 2017, he retweeted Vitalik's tweet and said:

· "Ethereum is heading for great centralism or disaster."

On August 19, 2018, he said in a twitter reply:

· "Scalability of computing and governance models that violate immutability are big issues for Ethereum."

On October 21, 2019, when asked in a podcast why he was no longer optimistic about Ethereum, he replied:

· "The attitude of ethereum leadership changed, and they started advocating centralization for their own benefit."

Fuzzy watershed

From pro to con, from positive to negative, from optimistic to pessimistic, there must be a dividing line.

According to a search on Twitter, Saab's last positive comment on Ethereum was made on February 14, 2016, while the first negative comment was made on June 5, 2017, a span of more than a year. Saab has not tweeted anything about Ethereum during the year-plus vacuum.

Twitter is Sabo's main platform. In addition, there are occasional long posts on his personal blog, Unenumerated, but the last update was in 2018. There's also nothing on his blog about his attitude toward Ethereum.

As you can see, the time dimension of this attitudinal change is very fuzzy. When exactly did he start turning dark on Ethereum? There is no direct clue to the answer.

Saab's evaluation of Ethereum and its attitude change time chart

What is Saab against Ethereum?

Since the watershed, Saber's twitter references to Ethereum have been both accusatory and negative. "Centralization" was the word he used most often against Ethereum. At the same time, he preached his core message of "trust minimisation" almost all the time.

In 2019, for example, Saab came clean"Ethereum has been abandoned for a long time, largely due to the lack of understanding of governance and trust minimization by ethereum leadership."

He also pointed to what he called undeniable facts:"Ethereum on the one hand stands for immutability and resistance to censorship, but on the other hand attacks the principle of trust minimization; on the one hand it claims to be decentralized, but on the other hand it evolves into a centralized organization."

When asked if ETH was junk currency, he replied on Twitter:"It's sad, yes, that ethereum, which once sounded so promising, has become junk currency due to its transformation into a centralized organization."

At the same time, he attributed the underdevelopment of DeFi projects on Ethereum at that time (October 2019) to:"No one within the Ethereum community has enough influence to minimize enough trust in Ethereum to drive DeFi."

In addition, he assessed the state of the cryptocurrency space, believing that many fake connoisseurs have entered the space and made it less pure."These guys lack the basic values, including trust minimization, that give cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin great market value."

A cloud of keywords from Saab's Ethereum-related tweets

At the center of Saab's vision is ethereum's leadership, led by Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir. Vitalik, needless to say, is one of the founders of Ethereum. Vlad, on the other hand, is a former core Ethereum researcher known for his work on cryptoeconomics, PoS consensus mechanisms and blockchain sharding in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Vlad started the dispute: in January 2019, he published an article titled "Opposing Saab's Law, Seeking a New Cryptographic Legal System", which clearly stated his objection to Saab's Law and called it bullshit. Saab's law says:Do not make changes to the blockchain protocol except for necessary technical maintenance.This rule can also be called "blockchain governance minimization" or "cryptography minimization."

This principle is indeed an extension of Saab's philosophy of decentralization and minimization of trust. Saab himself has never claimed to have created the code, which is more like Vlad's claim to Saab.

Saab did not respond directly to Vlad's provocations. Vlad continued to denounce and challenge Saab on Twitter from time to time. Forced into a tit-for-tat stance, Saab repeatedly accused Vlad of centralization and personal attacks, and said the Ethereum team's willingness to tolerate Vlad's misdeeds proved they were no different from Vlad.

Saab also blamed Vitalik:"Vitalik is very fond of centralised parties vetting things based on preconceived opinions. Ethereum's so-called decentralisation is just for show. Vitalik is happy to open kangaroo courts on DeFi's huge funds."

He blocked Vlad and all Vlad supporters on Twitter. Vitalik is naturally included.

In 2001, Saab published a famous paper, "Trusted Third Parties are Security Vulnerabilities," which systematically laid out his core ideas. He thinks,When designing a security protocol, the existence of a trusted third party itself constitutes a security hole in the protocol.When a security protocol relies on a trusted third party, it will inevitably bring security risks caused by centralization, which inevitably requires expensive security costs, which will eventually be passed on to the users of the protocol. In order to remedy such security loopholes, it is necessary to eliminate the trusted third party as far as possible and realize "trust minimization".

Saab's lifetime of thought creation is always in practice of his concept of "trust minimization" : Bit Gold is to give up trust in centralized currency issuing institutions; Smart contracts are designed to reduce trust in third-party intermediaries.

The principles of decentralization and trust minimization are why Saab chose to embrace Ethereum, a decentralized smart contract platform, in the first place. When this principle is abandoned by the platform, the pure cypherpunk will be the first to stand against the platform.

So what makes Saab think Ethereum has abandoned its belief in decentralization?

Is Ethereum facing a centralization crisis?

The "Saab's Law" mentioned above, though stigmatizing, sums it up nicely. Do not make changes to the blockchain protocol except for necessary technical maintenance. That is, governance and changes to the blockchain protocol layer should be as minimal as possible. This is the principle of "governance minimization", in line with the ideas of "decentralization" and "trust minimization". These are the core values that Saab has always upheld.

As you can imagine, the changes in the protocol layer of the blockchain are undoubtedly the most sensitive to these values. During that year-plus watershed period (February 2016 to June 2017), Ethereum did have several protocol layer changes:

, Homestead upgrade on March 15, 2016Homestead is the second phase of Ethereum's development, a planned refinement upgrade that was outlined in the white paper.

, & have spentThe DAO hard fork on July 20, 2016:The DAO smart contract had a security hole and was hacked. To recover The DAO users' losses, Ethereum forcibly retrieved The stolen assets through a hard fork.

, & have spentTangerine Whistle Upgrade 18 October 2016Improvements to protocol layer vulnerabilities in response to the Ethereum network denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that occurred in September and October 2016.

, November 23, 2016 Spurious Dragon Upgrade:Ibid. Second response to denial of service attack.

Among them,The most notable event was The DAO hard fork. The incident was controversial from beginning to end and had a profound impact on Ethereum, arguably the first centralization crisis to hit ethereum.

In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO raised more than 10 million Ether coins through Token sales, with a total value of more than $150 million at The time. But because The DAO's smart contract had a flaw, it was hacked, and more than 30% of The ethereum was stolen by hackers. The Ethereum core team decided to implement a hard fork to recover the stolen funds and fix the vulnerabilities. However, the hard fork was not unanimously accepted by all participants in the community, especially the miners, which led to the split of Ethereum into two chains -- ETC: Ethereum Classic and the current Ethereum.

This hard fork event is highly controversial. Supporters argued that The hard fork thwarted The hacker's plot, served justice and protected The interests of The DAO's users. Opponents argue that hard forks seriously violate the immutable nature of blockchain and the principle of decentralization. One of the main reasons people embrace blockchain and support Ethereum is that they hate the traditional centralized institutions that can change rules and data at will. If Ethereum can also roll back and forth transactions through hard forks, how is it different from the centralized institutions?

The Ethereum Foundation has also been criticized for its involvement and promotion of The DAO project. The DAO was The largest and most influential project in The Ethereum ecosystem at The time. Several key members of The Ethereum Foundation were DAO The Token owner and served as a consultant on The DAO project. This gave The DAO project a quasi-official aura from The start, and its failure would have dealt an unbearable blow to The entire Ethereum ecosystem. Therefore, The core team of Ethereum had to rescue The DAO in The face of The accusation of centralization and rule tampering. The ugly story similar to "too big to fail" on Wall Street was staged in The world of blockchain, which made people surprised. This is undoubtedly a great irony to The decentralized spirit of blockchain.

To fork, or not to fork? That's a problem. After The DAO attack, The Ethereum community spontaneously launched an on-chain Vote -- Carbon Vote -- to ask The community for their opinion on whether a hard fork should be implemented. The end result was that the community overwhelmingly (87 percent) supported a hard fork. Yet such a poll is not very convincing, for several reasons:

, & have spentCarbon Vote calculates the Vote weight based on the number of Ether tokens held by the voting address. Whether it's The Ethereum Foundation or Slock.it, The company behind The DAO project, which owns huge amounts of Ethereum and is also a party to The event, The tendency of these whale addresses to support a hard fork is predictable.

, & have spentThe distribution of Ether was uneven, with 25 percent of votes coming from a single address. So it's hard to call the vote a community decision.

, & have spentLess than 6% of Ethereum holders voted. Many people do not know about the Carbon Vote or how to Vote.

Ultimately, the result of the unofficial Carbon Vote was taken by the Ethereum Foundation as evidence of "community support for a hard fork".

Saab has not publicly expressed its views on The DAO hard fork issue, but indirectly expressed its comments on The DAO Token offering through The voice of The SEC.

2017 年 7 月，美国证监会发布了一份关于 2016 年在以太坊上发行的 DAO Token 的调研报告。报告认为 DAO Token 的销售及交易应该遵循美国证券法。虽然 SEC 表示暂时不追究 DAO Token 发售和交易的法律责任，同时认为证券法对 IC0 的适用情况要依据实际情况而定，但 SEC 已经表达了把 IC0 项目纳入监管范围的态度。

Saab tweeted: "What The SEC is saying is that The DAO broke our rules like crazy, but we're not going to do anything about it other than write some report to scare people."

Saab's attitude towards The DAO incident is undoubtedly negative, but it has not been explicitly expressed publicly. Vlad, on The other hand, was direct, writing against Saab's rules: "The DAO hard fork is a clear violation of Saab's rules, and offended Saab enough to sever ties with Ethereum."

Additionally, Reddit user Cyounessi, a former head of risk management at MakerDAO, claimed that he had been monitoring Saab's social media, clearly sensed Saab's dislike of Ethereum, and implicitly pointed out The reason for his personal speculation that Saab was opposed to a hard fork of The DAO. He also noted: "In the year and a half I've been in the [Ethereum] community, I've never heard Saab say one good thing about Ethereum." This comment, published in June 2017, also fits into the fuzzy watershed time frame described above.

Ethereum closes Pandora's box

If The DAO hard fork event is ethereum opened The Pandora's box of centralization, then The proposal of IP-867 and IP-999 means that The box has a trend of opening bigger and bigger.There was heated debate in the community and criticism from Saab. Thankfully, neither bill passed in the end.

On February 2, 2018, someone in the Ethereum community proposed IP-867: Standardized Ethereum Recovery Proposal (ERP: Ethereum Recovery Proposal), which aims to create a standardized evaluation process specification for recovering funds lost on Ethereum due to bugs or errors.

The proposal of IP-867 starts with the Parity multi-signature wallet vulnerability. In November 2017, Parity's newly deployed WalletLibrary contract for multiple wallets was accidentally triggered by a user, and the WalletLibrary contract accidentally self-destructed, affecting 587 wallets associated with it. A total of 513,774 Ether coins were permanently frozen. In April 2018, the Parity team launched the IP-999 proposal, an attempt to bring frozen assets back to light by restoring code from the WalletLibrary contract.

The heavy losses caused by the massive coin loss incident led some members of the Ethereum community to consider a standardized recovery proposal to solve such problems, so several members led by Dan Phifer jointly sponsored proposal EIP-867.

In discussions about the proposal on Ethereum Magicians forums, many people expressed their opposition.

"Accepting or rejecting AN ERP is a governance issue," sfultong said. "The burden of making decisions should not be imposed on developers."

Postables thought: "this kind of problem should not be considered, because it to save a few users asset losses, can damage the integrity of the entire network. This kind of catastrophic losses or agreement is not the etheric lane network fault, but the author's fault, and, more importantly, is every victim was not well done due diligence fault."

Bwheeler96 was blunt: "I strongly oppose this proposal. Blockchains are not meant to rewrite history."

MicahZoltu, a supporter of the proposal, explains: "ERP is a involving loss (rather than a stolen) the recovery of funds will be hard bifurcate request standardized proposal. ERP process is very clear, it will never be used to take the money from an owner and assign it to another person, it will only no one can get the money allocated to should be able to use the money. This happens when someone typed in The wrong address or money gets locked up in a smart contract because of a bug. The ERP process clearly does not work for events like The DAO hard fork, where money is taken from one side and given to The other."

LocalethereumMichael argues that bad precedents should not be set: "This approach of 'protecting people from their own mistakes' leads to institutionalized theft because there is no clear formal boundary. Ip-999 may not be seen as theft, but every time we accept one of these proposals to undo a transaction, we are moving one step closer to a centralized agency with life-or-death power over the validity of a transaction. Each restoration sets another precedent, like The DAO incident (without which we wouldn't even be having this conversation). In The long run, if we accept this state change, Ethereum will slowly evolve into a centralized system for decades to come. These points were also made during The DAO hard fork debate in 2016, and are still valid today. Ethereum's fundamental strength is that code executes exactly as it is written, and there should be no exceptions for those who are careless.

Indeed, as the naysayers say,The proposal seriously violates the immutable nature of blockchain and the principle of governance minimization, and may even incur legal risks.

Less than two weeks after IP-867 was introduced, Yoichi Hirai, the trial editor for the proposal, resigned from his post. The reason, he said, was that the controversial proposal might violate a Japanese law called "unauthorized creation of electronic records: the intent to mismanage the affairs of others through illegal data creation." Before his resignation, he was one of six developers who had the right to update Ethereum's Github code repository.

Saab has commented that ERP is an abuse of the software upgrade process, an invitation for lawyers to step in, and undermines social scalability. The community should set up regulations to prohibit the expansion of software upgrades. Making special legal and accounting decisions to modify account balances must be on a prohibited list.

He also points out that the ERP is like an amateur court, lacking the most basic procedural protections learned in the first year of law school: notification of affected parties and standards for the quality of evidence. At the same time, he believes that ERP has no reliable and secure way to map and verify affected Ethernet addresses, making it an easy target for fraudulent claims.

According to CoinDesk, iP-867 was developed by Dan Philfer from Musiconomi, a project that was one of the victims of Parity's multi-signature wallet bug, which permanently lost 16,475 Ethereals they raised through IC0. Dan initiated the proposal as a direct stakeholder with the unstated intention that if IP-867 were passed, they would recover their losses.

But in the end, Dan didn't get it -- BOTH IP-867 and IP-999 were rejected. This time, Ethereum closed Pandora's box and did not repeat The DAO incident.

Saab's subjective mood and idealism

Saab's attitude towards Ethereum was clearly affected by The DAO's hard fork, but ethereum's rejection of IP-867 and IP-999 did not seem to have regained saab's trust. After that, what exactly does Saab think of Ethereum?

A twitter conversation between Saab and Ethereum developer Mark Beylin in October 2019 May provide some answers.

According to Saab, Ethereum is like a centralized organization, and their leadership is ignorant of some basic values (decentralization, minimization of trust, etc.) that really give value to blockchain and smart contracts.

Mark says the Ethereum community is much bigger than Saab imagined, and not just a few noisy voices on Twitter. There are a lot of people in the community who do care about the values that Satoshi has embedded into the BTC protocol. The rejection of IP-999 was a major turning point in terms of the imtamability of blockchain. Ethereum did make mistakes, but the important thing is to learn from them.

Saab also acknowledged that there are many people in the Ethereum community who do care about these values, but they have been "coaxed" by the ethereum leadership. Since The DAO fiasco, Ethereum has been practicing trust minimization for pragmatic reasons. But the leadership doesn't actually believe it. Vlad, in particular, whose full-time job is almost preaching against trust minimization, while others tacitly support him.

When Mark asked, "Are you concerned that your subjective emotions limit your ability to evaluate Ethereum rationally?"

Saab has no positive response, but said: "I support the etheric fang because emotional biases. Before I see its real face, for stupid egoism reason, I was attracted to it - because the etheric fang people tout intelligent contract this concept, they use my name to a monetary unit, and so on."

I think Saab's negative attitude towards Ethereum is more or less personal.Szabo admitted that he was attracted to Ethereum early on because of his subjective feelings of egotism, and he more or less carried his subjective feelings of dislike of Vlad into his value judgment of the ethereum community as a whole.For example, he blocked Vlad on Twitter along with all Vlad supporters because of his personal feud with him. When Vitalik asked "I like Vlad too, why am I not blocked?" Saab immediately satisfied Vitalik.

Saab acknowledges that there are many believers in decentralization in The Ethereum community, and that ethereum has been practicing The value of trust minimization since The DAO incident (ip-867 and IP-999 were rejected), but with "diehard elements" like Vlad in The leadership of Ethereum, Saab concluded that "Ethereum's so-called decentralization is just for show" and even generalized that "Ethereum has degenerated into a centralized community."

In addition, Saab, as a firm supporter of trust minimization, was too idealistic and even cynical on The DAO issue. Decentralization, minimization of trust and so on are all good principles, but when the theoretical ideas in the ivory tower are put into practice in the real world, some challenges and difficulties are inevitable.It's easy to blame Ethereum on the high ground of values, but operating and maintaining such a vast, decentralized smart contract platform is no easy task.Even Bitcoin isn't perfect, having had a soft fork rollback due to an overflow bug when it was less than two years old.

Etheric fang team in The DAO attack after implementation of hard branch and had no option but to some extent, because The etheric fang was just a baby just born less than a year, The DAO of The project to raise The etheric currency number about 14% of The total accounted for when The etheric issued currency, The amount is too large, If The DAO project were to fail due to hacking, it would be catastrophic for Ethereum.

If Saab were put in Vitalik's shoes, what would he have made? Is it to stick to the principle that blockchain cannot be tampered with, and watch the smart contract platform you created crumble? Or let values temporarily take a back seat to survival and continuity?

To say The least, The DAO hard fork was hardly an absolute centralized decision, with developers, users, miners, and The community all agreeing to a certain extent. Supporters migrate to the post-fork Ethereum, and those who don't subscribe to the hard fork can also choose to stay in the Ether Canon, and everyone is in their place.

So is Saab's criticism of Ethereum unfair? Of course not. In my opinion, Saab's existence as a naysayer overseer is positive for Ethereum:

, & have spentFirst, lookers-on see most of the game. Saab, as an outsider to the Ethereum community, can provide a sober perspective.

, & have spentSecond, a good medicine tastes bitter. Saab's attacks on Ethereum, even cynical, may be harsh, but some of them hit the nail on the head.

Both of these points can be seen in the discussion of flaws in Ethereum's governance mechanism.

Ethereum governance concerns

Saab argues that "the most important and difficult part of trust minimization is governance minimization." From this perspective, Vlad summed up Saab's law as minimization of blockchain governance, which is also a thorough understanding. The so-calledGovernance minimization, not no governance at all, but to minimize power and dependence on governance as much as possible.

Ethereum governance is an off-chain governance mechanism that relies on conference calls with core developers. Saab complained. As mentioned above, he blasted "ethereum leadership for how little they know about governance minimization" on Twitter, and argued that Ethereum's "violation of the governance model of immutable blockchain is a huge problem."

On December 1, 2018, when Lane Brettig, a core Ethereum developer, came out of a routine conference call, he sent out a dozen consecutive tweets about what was going on. He noted that the meeting broke two records: first, the length of the meeting, 2.5 hours; Then there's the attendance record, with a maximum of 43 out of 60 core developers worldwide online at the same time. But he feels bad for developers in the Asia-Pacific region (because of the time difference).

Saab's blunt response pointed out that there was a disconnect between core Ethereum developers and ethereum users -- users were very diverse, but developers didn't know anything about it, and calling it the Ethereum community was an abuse of the word "community." Saab's prescription for Ethereum was to improve "Social Scalability."

He said:"If Ethereum is to become a true world computer, it will have to improve social scalability by reaching as many diverse users as possible in different parts of the globe in a trusted way, rather than just among a few English-speaking acquaintances."

What is social scalability? Saab explains: "Social scalability is about overcoming [accessibility] flaws in human thought and institutions that limit who and how many people can participate."

He also suggested specific measures to improve social scalability -- reducing the number of topics: "Each stakeholder participating in a conference call reduces the voice of all other stakeholders, making such community communication unscalable.The way to expand is to reduce the number of issues and narrow the scope of debate."

Saab believes ethereum can narrow the debate by strictly forbidding any potential transaction reversals at the chain level and forgoing improvements to computing scalability and chain performance, which would benefit the simplicity and stability of the overall architecture, like taking unnecessary issues off the table. And where possible, Ethereum can move new functionality and improvements in computing scalability or chain performance from the tier 1 chain code level to smart contracts or tier 2 applications.

Reduce the number of issues on the table and minimize knife cuts at the chain level. This is the kind of governance minimization saab advocates.

Saab is not alone in criticizing ethereum's current governance regime for not adhering to governance minimization. For example, the recent implementation of IP-1559, which updated ethereum's transaction pricing mechanism, also changed Ethereum's monetary policy, which is quite significant. There is no shortage of opposition in the community. Among them, some argue that EIP-1559's economic model is unconvincing. But even though they pointed out the problem, it didn't attract much attention or discussion from the Ethereum Foundation, and it didn't sway the foundation's determination to pursue the proposal. Opponents complain that the Ethereum Foundation is headstrong and unrestrained, and never seems to see any limits to its power. Any foundation-led proposal that is not technically impossible can be passed. This is especially true in recent years, when the underlying design needs to be changed and the monetary policy needs to be changed, leaving no room for governance minimization.

Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Paradigm, a well-known crypto investment fund, points out in Governance MinimizationThe importance of governance minimization -- which underlies the main value proposition in cryptocurrencies today: credible neutrality -- a system that treats everyone fairly and does not favour or discriminate against any particular group of people.Minimal governance often greatly improves the credible neutrality of protocols.

Unfortunately, the credible neutrality of Ethereum's governance regime is being challenged. Foundations enjoy a privileged position in promoting proposals, and every proposal they lead gets a green light, even if there are strong objections, while other community members involved in Ethereum governance are ignored, and the balance of credibility and neutrality is heavily skewed.

When credible neutrality is weakened, more and more issues will be put on the table, there will be people who want to take a knife to the code at the chain level, changes to the underlying protocols will be discussed, and governance minimization will be out of the question. Ethereum's leadership seems to understand this. It is Vitalik's article that Fred cites in his explanation of credible neutrality. But somehow, they seem to be doing the opposite.

conclusion

Nick Saab's stance on Ethereum has ranged from early support to late opposition for reasons that are unclear. But his public criticism of Ethereum shows that some of its practices and behaviors violate the core philosophy he has always upheld and preached -- trust minimization. Among them, The DAO hard fork event occurred in 2016 is The most prominent. Although ethereum learned a lesson and did not let The event that destroyed The imtamability of blockchain happen again, it has lost The trust of Saab.

In my opinion, Saab's negative attitude towards Ethereum is influenced by its own decentralized idealism, as well as more or less subjective sentiment. But there is no denying that Ethereum's governance mechanism has problems and lacks consideration for governance minimization. Saab's criticisms and suggestions for improvements deserve reflection from every community member involved in ethereum governance.