Vitalik reiterated Ethereum's mission: to reduce vulnerability to external dependencies through resilience, thereby granting people sovereignty and fr...

ChainCatcher reports that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin reiterated Ethereum's mission: "Ethereum was not created to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to liberate people." This is a significant and controversial statement from the "Trustless Declaration," and it deserves our re-examination and a better understanding of its meaning. The terms "efficient" and "convenient" imply improving the average performance in an already quite good situation. Efficiency refers to getting the world's best engineers to work their souls to reduce latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increase yield from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY.

Convenience means allowing people to register with just one click instead of three, reducing registration time from one minute to 20 seconds. These things may seem appealing, but we must understand that we can never outmaneuver the corporate players in Silicon Valley in this game.

Therefore, the core underlying game Ethereum plays must be a different game. This game is resilience. Resilience isn't about 4.5% APY versus 5.3% APY; it's about minimizing the risk of suffering a -100% APY. Resilience is if you become politically unpopular and get banned, or your application developers go bankrupt or disappear, or Cloudflare goes down, or an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency remains at 2000ms. Resilience means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can access the network and become a top-tier participant.

Resilience is sovereignty, sovereignty in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies that could be arbitrarily stripped away at any time. This is the game Ethereum is suited to win. Ethereum must first and foremost be a decentralized, permissionless, and resilient block space—and then enrich it.