The Single Word That Sums Up Ethereum Objectives and how is it different from bitcoin?
Blockchain cultures are vividly exposed for what they are during bear times. The most recent meltdown exposed decentralized finance (DeFi) marketplaces as an intricate maze of contagious financial instruments. DeFi produced an accelerationist mirror image of the inherited financial system rather than an open, unrestricted replacement for it. The truth is that it will happen once more because Ethereum, the home of DeFi, has an unclear political destiny. Although nobody is sure what Ethereum is for, its technical objective is an open, transparent world computer. What's the purpose, why are we here? a huge question mark. Like Bitcoin, where the political endgame can be summed up in one word: hyperbitcoinization, the scenario can be compared to Bitcoin. The objective of Bitcoin is to replace the current monetary system with the Bitcoin one. It's crucial to comprehend the current political climate of Ethereum to find it. The cypherpunk movement, which gave rise to Ethereum, believed that programmers should employ computation and encryption to create a neutral infrastructure that others can endow with meaning. The only goal of Ethereum's politics is to provide open-source tools that require minimal human intervention, which is frequently referred to as algorithmic authority. connected to the "core" Ethereum devs.
The combination of market-making (such as Quadratic Voting) and experimental governance (such as soulbound tokens) on Ethereum can result in new liberal democratic political innovations. Glen Weyl of Microsoft and Vitalik Buterin, the network's founder, are both connected to this job. With a warm ambient humanism ingrained in its aesthetics, the social coordination made possible by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can have a positive externality on larger societies. Examples include Manu Alzuru of DoinGud, Scott Moore of Bitcoin, and Kevin Owocki of Bitcoin.
Typically adopting an agorist, or left-libertarian political viewpoint, the privacy benefits provided by zero-knowledge proof variations on Ethereum-native technologies (DAOs, DeFi, NFTs) are required to safeguard crypto culture against present surveillance capitalism. The philosophers Rachel-Rose O'Leary and Amir Taaki of DarkFi are linked to this movement. Ethereum is a platform for the creation of extremely speculative financial instruments, and its users' main objective is to amass wealth, perhaps even through immoral methods. basically a manifestation of market nihilism
The market nihilists should be disregarded since they have a short-term perspective and have no genuine interest in Ethereum's long-term prospects. On the other end of the scale, Ethereum aims to replace an outdated financial system that was founded on unsustainable methods. Additionally, from the internal variations on these techniques that may be seen in degen culture and its facilitators, hedge funds, and venture capital firms. Without a response, there is always a chance that the answer is to pump ether, produce yield, flip NFTs, etc. This does not imply that we must combine the various points of view into a single, cohesive meta stance, but rather that it would be beneficial to have a solution that we could all broadly agree upon, as well as running code. The political endpoint of Ethereum can be summed up in one word: hyper-regeneration, which seeks consensus across the board.
Ethereum's Quadratic Funding (QF) method allows proactive and retrospective public goods funding, as opposed to false endless growth. As the solarpunks' emphasis on positive externalities shows, it has the potential to extend the cypherpunk mechanism of neutral public goods beyond Ethereum and Web3 into the realm of conventional politics. Ethereum might then develop into a liberal and humanist-based minarchist alternative to state provisioning. Ethereum might reward excellent citizenship through retroactive airdrops, such as participation in Gitcoin rounds, governance voting, testnets, and community channels, rather than soulless individualistic speculation. We might ensure that the privacy-focused lunarpunk attitude enables individuals to "selectively expose" themselves, and we could ensure that the behaviors of the citizens of experimental liberalism are recorded in soulbound tokens that develop with time (or do not reveal themselves at all). For this to succeed, safe social or community recovery techniques must be established.
Decentralization that regenerates as opposed to centralization that atrophy: An information commons or common knowledge pool is Ethereum. Although not without difficulties, transparency enables us to spot the emergence of centralized clusters. The current push to re-decentralize staking and recent efforts to re-decentralize client diversity shows that the cultural inclinations to thwart centralization atrophy are still there. This will call for the cypherpunk developer community to adopt a "night watchman" approach.