Thought experiment: Ethereum has failed in 5 years. Why did it fail? How we can prevent it?

Magicians Primordial Soup
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1. Detailed explanations: Experimental Shards

  1. Ethereum creates much a lot of innovations in research. Nevertheless we have difficulties in adoption: very few of improvements get implemented and the process is very slow. More centralized competitors improve their products faster.

  2. It is a real problem, because there is only two promises can win on the market:
    “the most stable” or “the fastest innovation”. Everything in between, that does not held promise “immutable like bitcoin” and is not “the fastest innovator” will fail.
    Ethereum has promised to be innovative, thats why it MUST be the fastest innovator among of his kind to survive.

  3. Usually people suggest to introduce Ethereum-wide (semi-centralized?) governance in the hope to make decision making faster. The downside will be the greatly decreased inclusivity and the lowed decisions quality because centralized actor get biased much easier. Lack of inclusivity and biased centralized governance will force innovators to split off from Ethereum and continue as separate projects.
    Ethereum will speed up first but then break apart.

  4. I think, the lack of governance is not the reason why we can not make decisions fast enough.
    The problem is: decisions to be made are too complex for big amount of decision makers. Someone can make one complex decision, many people can agree on simple decision, but making complex decision by many parties will fail.

  5. Our EIP process now: all CoreDevs must agree on EIP implementation in CoreDev calls. Looks like usual EIP decision is not simple enough and there are too many decision makers.
    Solution: Let’s allow EIP implementation by few ethereum clients first and let others to join the implementation later. Few clients (or even only one) will agree on EIP faster. If the EIP gets implemented by some clients, it will be easier to adopt it for others.

  6. Implementation idea was proposed by @vbuterin in Cancun: shards with different state of “maturity”. An “experimental” shard may implement “new experimental features” supported by only one or few ethereum clients. If it works well, other implementations will follow and the EIP gets “matured”.

  7. The idea of “experimental shards” or “experimental sidechains” raises a new interesting question: what is ethereum? What sidechain or shard is still ethereum what is a new separate project? Is it an ETH coin? is it technology? Is it consensus mechanism? Which invariants are ethereum-wide?
    Is Tendermint or Quorum an ethereum “sidechain”?
    Anyway the more ethereum is able to “unite” different sub-networks, the more strong it will be. It will be great if anyone could start his own “ethereum clone” and still stay in ethereum network whatever it will be.

2. Detailed explanations: Core Projects funding: EF vs Community.

  1. Inclusiveness boosts competition of implementations and ideas. Nevertheless some Core Projects were preselected “in advance” in early ages and promoted as part of Ethereum regardless if they will succeed or not. Swarm and Whisper are good examples.

  2. The “early pre-selection” of the project creates risks:

    • it creates incentives to prefer EF as an employer over project’s future users.
    • lower incentives for project to deliver, more incentives to become endless story.
    • project can’t be replaced or abandoned easily because it will mean “Ethereum failure”.
    • potential competitors are get “officially pre-excluded” from Ethereum Core Tect because of “officially pre-selected” one. Think about IPFS, PSS, Filecoin as competitors of Swarm and Whisper.

  3. Al in all: We should check whether any “early pre-selected” Core projects are retarding the Ethereum project in general. This “pre-selection” of particular projects may had valid reasons three years ago, but now we should re-think their special status. It doesn’t means we (or EF) should stop them or cut off grants, but it means their competitors should become the same chance to become part of Ethereum Core.

  4. How some projects became “pre-selected” by EF? I think they were not. It is just a public perception of the long-term mutual commitment of the EF to fund the project and of the project team to work on it. “Funded by EF” is a strong endorsement, which becomes “pre-selection” over the years with all negative consequences mentioned above.

  5. What can we do? I would prefer to see Core Projects funded by community in some kind of honest ICO or may be by special purpose Prediction Market. It will create enough pressure on projects to perform and it will create incentives to shareholder to review critically what the projects are doing. ICO craze has shown how strong public funding can be. But we have unsolved challenge there:

  6. Challenge: It is officially discouraged for Core and Infrastructure Ethereum projects to create own utility coin if it is possible to operate with ETH. If there is no utility coin, what is the investment vehicle and where are rewards for successful investors are coming from?

  7. Solution idea: if some meaningful Core project gets merged into ethereum main, it will raise ethereum evaluation. This is where investor rewards may come from. The exact mechanism need to be developed yet.

  8. If we succeed to create a mechanism for market evaluation of ethereum core projects, we will speed up ethereum, IMHO.

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