The permissionless nature of Ethereum comes at a price, but it is necessary and beneficial.
Original title: “Viewpoint丨How do you view Ethereum’s dark forest law? 》
Written by: Trenton Van Epps
Translation: Li Hanbo
Summary
Ethereum is permissionless in terms of technology, community, and governance-which means that anyone can access these layers. Although this openness will bring costs to the community, this is why Ethereum has become such a large and dynamic ecosystem. We must always remember this reality and not be distracted by what we are building. This is a global stage where cooperation comes first .
Introduction
Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos in their article “Ethereum is a dark forest” compare Ethereum’s adversarial environment with the concept of “dark forest”. This metaphor comes from a book of the same name, used to describe ” In an environment, being discovered means that you must die in the hands of advanced predators. “
It vividly describes the Ethereum mempool, which is a virtual space of pending transactions waiting to be included in the block. mempool is closely monitored by robots of unknown origin, who monitor transactions and their potential end status. If it is profitable, they will relentlessly “shelter and intercept” these transactions to gain profits.
Every layer of Ethereum is a dark forest
In the following content, I will extend the dark forest metaphor to also include other technical aspects of Ethereum, as well as its community and governance layer. Just as anyone can observe the transactions in the mempool for use, arbitrageurs can use each layer to obtain their ultimate benefits, regardless of whether they consider the long-term benefits of the community .
Give a few examples.
- Technology: Deploy to the mainnet, add status to the chain, monitor mempool, in order to preemptively.
- Community: Participate in the community, Twitter hot search, donate to the Gitcoin fund.
- Governance: lobbying or opposing specific technological changes, participating in consensus, and participating in all core development calls.
When this happens, it feels like other people are using infrastructure that they have not contributed to for free . If they are other community members, because of their abuse, these should be better infrastructure will be dragged down by them.
Although the permissionless nature of Ethereum affects every level, we must remember that this design is its own nature. In fact, for an economic ecosystem, if no one invests, it is actually more worrying. This will make the final project less interesting. We are lucky that this has not happened yet. The current feature is the revolutionary aspect of Ethereum, and it is worth our continued investment.
Embrace the dark forest features of Ethereum
It is worth remembering that in just 5 years, Ethereum has become a:
- A collection of emerging technologies, communities and governance features that cannot be replicated in any other ecosystem
- Through an ever-growing open mechanism, anyone can conduct creative experiments without permission.
- With a decentralized and distributed nature, any organization can participate in it.
These amazing properties are all in an ecosystem! All of these are the result of the origin and growth of Ethereum as a dark forest ecosystem: permissionless, chaotic, and open to everyone.
These attributes have the same rights as retail investors and giants, one of the favorite frameworks of the Ethereum community. Both retail households and dark forests are sources of sustained energy for the community. Anyone, from any background and from any country, can get what we are developing-this is a powerful motivation for us to continue our efforts.
What does Ethereum achieve
We have seen people from all over the world take advantage of Ethereum’s capabilities . As Virgil said: “Ethereum is an unprecedented stage for playing cooperative games.” An arena full of coordinated machines: no matter what happens in the physical world, tools and infrastructure will continue to operate . In a truly credible neutral manner, these coordination machines can be used for any purpose: from inspiring to ordinary, from ordinary to evil.
Again, it’s worth reminding that Ethereum makes
- An open organization anyone can create or join
- Transparent transaction records
- Global financial products and markets
- Community currency
- money transfer
- Non-custodial financial services
- Fair compensation market
- Persistent scripts that can be deployed on the global computer.
- Same identity as others
- Financialization of other things
- Multinational companies coordinate local resource extraction
When expectations are contrary to reality
In this list, there are not only very good development potential, but also potential disadvantages . If we are overwhelmed by negative results, sometimes we may feel that Ethereum is not worth our effort.
The yield farming event this summer once again highlighted the division of the community. On one side is a prominent voice, raising concerns about the speed of the experiment, calling for “The DAO” and ICO fanaticism. On the other hand, a celebration of radical experiments and participation in these experimental projects.
The community contains different views on how quickly and in what way the ecosystem should develop . It is important to understand that this is the latest manifestation of an old model, and this model will continue as long as there are blocks. In the future, there will still be fanatical and rampant speculation to affect Ethereum’s capacity.
All this can be attributed to Molochs: opportunistic monsters live with us in the forest, with the sole purpose of perpetuating the failure of coordination (Meditations on Moloch). Fanatics like yield farming introduce uncertainty into our expectations, subvert norms, and strip collective meaning from our personal framework–especially pushing up gas fees.
There are countless different communities at all three levels (technology, community, governance). They have very different ultimate goals for Ethereum, but they all want to use the power of its dark forest.
They may try to use the community and governance to obtain support or funding, or even divert attention from valuable projects . Some of these will eventually have negative long-term ecosystem or regulatory impacts. Some will incite their own fanaticism, and some will incite the core community to make them confused about what valuable goals are and how to pursue them. Given the unlicensed access to technology and the plasticity of the social and political layers, we cannot 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 use our opposing mentality for long-term games.
We need to understand that we share every layer with people who are aligned and non-aligned . We need to embrace-or tolerate-an uncertain, seemingly unstable, permissionless ecosystem.
Do we believe that there are still worthwhile technology, community and governance experiments on Ethereum? Then we must accept reality better.
Most people are profit-driven . But you need to focus on maintaining your determination until the mechanism you value is valued by others. It’s not just other people in the ecosystem-there are other parts of the entire planet, welcome them into the dark forest!
Whether it is now or in the future, we must build this as a community . This is a large-scale collective experiment. The forest needs diverse interests, backgrounds and skills as inputs to make its cooperative games and coordination machines. It requires some people to act cautiously, while others need to fuel the flames. This should be like this. It is our ability to negotiate between these two poles, which makes me, as always, hopeful that what we are building together will continue to be realized .
all in all
Ethereum has always been a confrontational environment. Compared with all other encryption platforms and communities, its dark forest characteristics are its uniqueness. Because Ethereum’s technology, community, and governance levels are permissionless, anyone can use and abuse them. We cannot control this access, but we make our choice.
In an era of rapid change, we must remind ourselves of the basic reason why we started in the first place. We should redouble our efforts and renew our commitment to cultivating the dark forest of Ethereum. After all, the positive results are still significant.
Source link: mp.weixin.qq.com
