We are in an unprecedented period of social, political and economic turmoil. As the decentralized financial infrastructure powering billions of dollars of value and building thousands of companies grows, we need to recognize instability around us. The systems, protocols and incentives we create now can be less susceptible to censorship, government overreach and misinformation.
Ethereum 2.0’s design has a number of attractive attributes that make it exceptionally well-positioned to reliably operate through the choppy waters ahead as a neutral infrastructure, not as a biased platform. Individuals, enterprises and governments can be confident that Ethereum 2.0 will continue functioning in the instance of individual or state-actor level attacks. It is a solid foundation on which to build economic and financial infrastructure.
- Eth2 has rough consensus (finding general agreement, not simple majority rule) and a lack of on-chain governance (a rejection of plutocratic rule). This makes Eth2 governance difficult to capture. By design, it is much harder for entities to force Eth2 to favor or censor others.
- Keeping the community together is one of the highest priorities of rough consensus. Rough consensus largely avoids highly contentious or controversial changes whenever possible, since it is difficult to find rough consensus on them. This leaves the decision space of rough consensus to primarily technical topics, which are grounded in facts and logic, and seek to minimize controversy.
- Eth2’s rate of inflation is expected to be less than 1%, one of the lowest inflation rates of any protocol and much lower than the dollar.
- EIP-1559 (which will likely be active on Ethereum even before the transition to Eth2) will make ETH more scarce, and therefore potentially more valuable, as Eth2 usage increases.