How can Ethereum become your final "digital safe haven"?

Author: vitalik.eth   Translator: Plain Language Blockchain

"Ethereum was not created to make finance more efficient, nor to make applications more convenient and efficient. It was created to give people freedom."

This is from the Trustless Manifesto. We should redeploy our understanding and delve deeper into its meaning.

The words "efficient" and "convenient" usually imply optimizing the "average case," that is, improving upon an already quite good foundation. Efficiency means having the world's top engineers dedicate their efforts to reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing the annualized return (APY) from 4.5% to 5.3%. Convenience means allowing users to click only once instead of three times, or reducing registration time from about one minute to 20 seconds.

Doing these things is certainly good. But we must recognize that in this area, we can never beat those Silicon Valley party companies. Therefore, the core game that Ethereum participates in must be a different game altogether. What is the pandemic game? It's "Resilience." The "Mental Illness" infection game isn't about whether the infection rate is 4.5% or 5.3%, but about minimizing the probability of experiencing a -100% loss (total wipeout). The "Mental Illness" bankruptcy game means that even if you are politically unpopular and banned, even if the developers you use disappear, or even if Cloudflare goes down, or even if an internet war breaks out, your 2000 millisecond latency will still remain at 2000 milliseconds without interruption. The "dementia" game means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can access the network and become a participant. This sovereignty isn't about lobbying to become a UN world leader or later shaking hands at the Davos Forum; rather, it's about what people often call "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies that can be stretched at any time. This "world computer" embodies the meaning of sovereignty and strives to empower its users. This bottom line supports "interdependence among equals," rather than becoming a vassal of a corporate hegemon thousands of kilometers away. This is the game Ethereum is destined to win. In this turbulent world, Ethereum provides value that many people need. The fundamental genes of Web2 consumer technology are not suited to "usual" practices. While the fundamental genes of "finance" typically invest ample effort, it's a very conventional approach, adept only at mitigating certain types of risk, and ineffective against others. Block space is abundant. However, decentralized, permissionless, and intelligent block space is not. Ethereum's wasteland task requires a decentralized, permissionless, and intelligent block space, and then achieving this abundance.