2. The Great Innovatio and Grave Mistakes of Ethereum
One day in November 2013, 19-year old Vitalik Buterin published his paper, "Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform."
The title of this white paper was certainly exciting. It stated "what Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create 'contracts' that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing users to create any of the systems described above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code."
Turing-completeness meant that Ethereum provided a global, public, universal smart contract cloud server – yes, Vitalik positioned Ethereum as a world computer from the beginning, and he hoped that this vision would be realized in the ETH 2.0 plan. Sharding, a technology that enhances Ethereum's performance, was once the primary goal of ETH 2.0. At that time, Ethereum was using the PoW consensus mechanism, which it had copied from Bitcoin, and its efficiency was very low, only processing 15 transactions per second. We all know that account transfer are the lowest-gas transaction type. For transactions generated by a contract interaction, gas is often ten times or more higher. So, Ethereum might only handle one or even a fraction of a transaction triggered by a contract interaction per second. If, unfortunately, the price of ETH drops or rises sharply, causing congestion and gas prices to skyrocket several hundred times, and there is a maximum gas limit on Ethereum, then for most users who are initiating transactions, it's essentially the same as a crash!
The entire industry was eagerly waiting for sharding to significantly improve Ethereum's performance. As early as the "BeyondBlock Taipei 2017" conference, Vitalik had already begun to push for this technology update. Seven years have passed, what has actually happened is the abortion of ETH 2.0 and sharding has already been removed from the roadmap.
Clearly, we need a thorough reflection!
Vitalik's blockchain career began in 2011 when he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. Unfortunately, this teenage technical genius not only failed to inherit Satoshi Nakamoto's governance ideas in the proof-of-work consensus, but also remained ignorant of the fundamental role of finance and the unequal social relations built by capital.
What we can't fault is that Bitcoin, due to Satoshi Nakamoto's own limitations, only achieved a very crude software model with its PoW. Plus, Satoshi Nakamoto's sudden disappearance, for reasons unknown to us, meant that he could not continue to be involved in the practical implementation of the blockchain, improving Bitcoin through extensive open source collaboration.
The lesson that Satoshi Nakamoto left behind doesn't seem to be much: just the Bitcoin white paper and Bitcoin 0.1.0 (the first version to be used). However, most people either couldn't understand the code or the white paper, and unable to attain true enlightenment of thought and knowledge. Even if many of them racked their brains to ponder other extremely scarce writings left behind by Satoshi Nakamoto, it was to no avail.
For example, on January 3, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto launched the genesis block, he quoted the front page of The Times: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." This message is widely seen as Satoshi Nakamoto's dissatisfaction with the Bank of England's excessive money printing after the 2008 financial crisis. However, it is precisely because of excessive adherence to this information and its connection to money that everyone has overlooked another interpretation. This interpretation is hidden in the proof-of-work:
Capitalism is unsustainable. Bitcoin is a project that doesn't want to take the capitalist path.
I have already interpreted Satoshi Nakamoto's thoughts in my previous article: proof-of-work is Satoshi Nakamoto's declaration of war against capitalism! This is of paramount importance to Satoshi Nakamoto! Because he undoubtedly did not intend to extend the life of capitalism, but was trying to pave the way for a new civilization of mankind. Otherwise, his painstaking efforts to explore a financial system built on decentralization, anti-censorship, permissionless, public (open and transparent), trustless trust, etc., not only foreshadowed the end of capitalist finance with the aforementioned quote, but also consistently remained anonymous so hard, making no sense!
We know that the contemporary human world is under the rule of capitalism, where capital is the most fundamental core of the human world. Karl Marx, as early as his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 revealed the unstoppable silent power of capital: it gives capitalists special social power, and provides them with guarantees through political power and social contracts primarily based on law, until it builds a human world based on dominance, control, and enslavement, namely, capitalist society. In other words, if we want to advance human society, the only way is to destroy the power of capital!
Satoshi Nakamoto, through the PoW embedded in Bitcoin, is the great governance idea for human society that Marx envisioned! PoW has landed in Bitcoin, and it is precisely the great practice leading to communism that Marx described and desired!
Sadly, in 2013 when Ethereum was launched, the co-founders were either capitalists or talented guys aspiring to become capitalists. Ethereum went live on June 30, 2015, and its public chain was not activated until July 30. It's a bit strange, isn't it? Because a year earlier, the Ethereum founding team launched a successful fundraising activity called ICO, and it needs time to pre-mine a huge number of Ethers.
The famous ICO was held in July, 2014, and it sold out over 60 million ETH, raised 31,000 BTC, which was $18 million at the time. Also, 9.9% of ETH was determined to be pre-mined for the founding team at no cost, and another 9.9% of ETH would be pre-mined for the Ethereum Foundation at no cost. The delay of the public blockchain was primarily due to the completion of pre-mining.
This is the typical technological capitalization that Satoshi Nakamoto despised, using "electronic cash" ETH as capital for pre-sale, enabling more capitalists to participate in the capitalist mode of production to acquire surplus value. Yes, the Ethereum founding team locked down the great technological innovation of blockchain development – "realizing a world computer" – to the capitalist mode of production, which is causing great obstacles to human social progress.
The madness of Ethereum capitalists does not end there.
On April 30, 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO was launched on Ethereum, an investment project developed by smart contracts. After three weeks of token sales, it raised 14% of the total ETH, valued between $150 and $166 million, from over 11,000 capitalists, making it the largest crowdfunding event in history at the time.
This is a screenshot I took the day before the project ended.
The DAO's slogans were thrilling:
The DAO is revolutionary.
The DAO is autonomous.
The DAO is rewarding.
The DAO is code.
Well, only the third statement is truly the point. That's the most real and reliable ambition of these 11,000 capitalists.
I introduced this event in a book I edited (in-chief) in 2016. On June 17, hackers exploited a bug in The DAO's smart contract and hijacked 3.6 million ETH. Ethereum's official team immediately notified the entire community of the incident and quickly launched a rescue plan. Initially, Ethereum founder Vitalik proposed a soft fork of the Ethereum network, adding a line of code to blacklist the attackers and prevent them from transferring the stolen funds. Ultimately, around 2:30 pm Hong Kong time on July 21, 11,000 capitalists reached a consensus, Ethereum executed a hard fork, and the stolen funds were forcibly returned to the capitalists' accounts.
(For more details, see: What Was The DAO?、The Dao attack)
Yes, seriously, Ethereum's ICO obscured Satoshi Nakamoto's great design in PoW! This is primarily due to the lack of understanding by its founding team members, and as a foundation for application development, it has greatly hindered blockchain development. Especially for the thousands of dApps in the Ethereum ecosystem that went on a crazy ICO spree afterward, Ethereum can't escape the blame!
The consequences of The DAO event have become even worse! Including Vitalik, 11,000 capitalists have shown the world how they ruthlessly trampled on the core values of the blockchain, such as censorship resistance, built through Satoshi Nakamoto's painstaking practice, to ensure their own interests. Yes, Ethereum capitalists' exemplary actions have hindered the entire industry for ten years, even allowing many scammers to run rampant and harm many people. It has also brought shame to Satoshi Nakamoto!
In short, so far, Ethereum only has the outward shells of two governance consensuses, PoW and PoS (originally introduced by Peercoin in 2013), but violates their true governance ideas. Ten precious years have been wasted like this. The abortion of the ETH 2.0 plan is only natural for Ethereum.
So, let's imagine, what would be the first suggestion Satoshi Nakamoto would give us if we'd like to save Ethereum?
Rebuild the public governance fund!
Absolutely.
The project I launched in 2019, DAism, has built a new governance consensus called Proof-of-Value (PoV) . One of the responsibilities of this consensus is to reconstruct the public governance fund for Ethereum and govern Smart Commons (public goods) and tokenomics.
Proof-of-Value introduces "ETH Forging", burning ETH through a smart contract, and then using an algorithm to forge a new token UTO for users.
When forging, 50 "Satoshi Nakamoto" will participate and rebuild a public fund with the rewards theoretically belonging to them. The name is "Satoshi UTO Fund."
The Satoshi UTO Fund is the public governance fund for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
UTO is an ERC-20 type token. In other words, the Satoshi UTO Fund ultimately achieves its decentralization and autonomy through smart contracts, and AI.
You may have this question: why don't we redesign a new public chain, but continue to modify Ethereum?
The main reason is that after being positioned as a world computer by the genius boy Vitalik, Ethereum has made huge contributions: it has expanded public chain's governance scope and increased the basic governance of some key points for applications. This is absorbing the successful governance experience of the ledger, leaving the deployment and self-execution of smart contracts to the consensus mechanism for decentralized governance. This has opened up the development journey of dApps.
It must be emphasized that, as internet users, we all know that smart contracts, as an innovation, are destined to be remembered in history. Because only with smart contracts can we build dApps that truly comply with all the values (requirements) inspired by Bitcoin: transparent, decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless, trustless trust—so far, no one has figured out these features, which actually means that Ethereum has taken the public nature of the dApps we can develop to an incredibly reliable level like never before!
Secondly, if you've learned about EIPS, Ethereum Improvement Proposals, then you know that Ethereum's technological development has been a collective effort.
We are a group of people dedicated to building a new human civilization, and we should respect everyone's contributions. We also believe that everyone wants us to continue to improve Ethereum through friendly collaboration, rather than stepping on it to climb up!
Now, let's ask an interesting question: in terms of programming languages, can Java, Go, Python, C++, develop smart contracts?
No. You must use smart contract programming languages, such as Solidity.
Then, what language is used to develop Bitcoin's core client (Bitcoin core) and Ethereum's most important client?
C++ and Go.
Nothing Weired?
We must write code in smart contract development languages like Solidity, deploy it to Ethereum to run, in order to meet our requirements for blockchain contract security and reliability!
Then, the contract between the Ethereum's consensus and miners is completely executed outside of the smart contract, isn't this a violation of knowing and doing?
For the PoW and PoS governance consensuses that were launched in 2009 and 2012, respectively, the fundamental reason why their governance capabilities are insufficient is the improper use of technology: they both belong to governance consensuses built with traditionary web technology. While PoV is a governance consensus built with smart contracts. We have just mentioned that only a contract built with smart contracts can truly achieve blockchain's security and reliability requirements. It is imperative to use PoV to solve the governance of public chain Ethereum.
Ethereum has a two-layer structure: the execution layer and the consensus layer. We need to completely transform the consensus layer:
Reconstruct the public governance fund, the "Satoshi UTO Fund." A consensus without a reasonable reward mechanism is a capital harvester worse than a castle in the air!
Use smart contracts to govern itself. DAism's solution is PoV. Web2 has shielded all kinds of privileges, only smart contracts can guarantee public, transparency, fairness, and reliability.
Completely isolate human interference. "Ethereum's 13,900 nodes are running 1 million validators, with 26% of the supply staked", many people think this is decentralization, while capitalists are particularly envious! Because they see this as another great victory for a few of their outstanding representatives. Blockchain doesn't need capitalists as our accountants!
Discard the size limitations of the blockchain. If there are blockchain size limitations, there will inevitably be bidding. This is one of the modes of production of capitalism! Also, I believe these improvements will instantly and permanently eliminate the MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) problem, and leave a bunch of vampire-like Layer 2 with nowhere to go!
Proof-of-Value refers to a systematically development which actually will be composed of a number of dApps and AIs even. DAism has completed its public governance fund and some specific governance methods. Every task above requires participation and even technological leadership from third parties. How many third-party projects are needed is still unknown.
In the following content, I will continue to share the insights I have gained from the development of DAism.
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