Ethereum’s Decade-Long Dilemma: Unpacking Its Core Values

Authored by: imToken

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For those closely following the Ethereum ecosystem, a peculiar dichotomy might have emerged recently.

• On one side, intense technical discussions revolve around scaling roadmaps, Rollup architectures, Interop, ZK, PBS, and slot time reduction.
• On the other, debates simmer over whether the “Ethereum Foundation is arrogant,” “why isn’t it more aggressive,” and “the stagnant ETH price,” often escalating into emotional confrontations.

These discussions invariably point to a deeper, more fundamental question: What kind of system does Ethereum truly aspire to be?

Indeed, many controversies don’t stem from technical disagreements but from differing interpretations of Ethereum’s foundational “value premises.” Therefore, only by returning to these core premises can we genuinely understand why Ethereum makes choices that many now perceive as “inopportune.”

I. Ethereum’s Decade-Long Dilemma: Is the Network Degenerating?

The Ethereum community has been far from quiet lately.

From reflections on the Rollup-centric roadmap to debates surrounding the concept of “Ethereum Alignment,” and comparisons with a host of high-performance public chains, a subtle yet persistent “Ethereum anxiety” is palpable.

This anxiety is not difficult to understand.

While other public chains constantly break records in TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience, Ethereum seems preoccupied with intricate discussions about architectural sharding, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality. These topics appear neither intuitive nor immediately appealing.

This leads to a sharper question: Is Ethereum, in fact, “degenerating”?

To answer this, one must look beyond the technical roadmap of the last year or two and extend the perspective to a longer time horizon—to what Ethereum has truly upheld over the past decade.

In recent years, many burgeoning high-performance public chains have chosen a more direct path: achieving extreme performance and user experience by reducing node count, raising hardware thresholds, and centralizing sequencing and execution authority.

From the Ethereum community’s perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing anti-fragility.

A frequently overlooked yet highly illustrative fact is that, over nearly a decade of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide outage or rollback event, maintaining continuous 24/7/365 uptime.

This isn’t because Ethereum is “luckier” than Solana or Sui; it’s because, from its inception, its design prioritized the system’s ability to operate continuously under the worst-case scenarios, placing this above raw performance metrics.

In other words, Ethereum’s perceived slowness today isn’t because it cannot be faster, but because it consistently asks a more challenging question: Can this system continue to function when the network scales, participants multiply, and the environment becomes increasingly hostile?

From this vantage point, the so-called “decade-long dilemma” isn’t a sign of Ethereum degenerating, but rather its proactive embrace of short-term discomfort and scrutiny for the sake of long-term survival.

II. Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: More Than Loyalty, It’s About Boundaries

Consequently, the first step to understanding Ethereum is to accept an unappealing but crucial truth: Ethereum is not a system solely focused on “efficiency maximization.” Its core objective isn’t to be the fastest, but to be “trustworthy under the worst conditions.”

Thus, within the Ethereum context, many seemingly technical issues are fundamentally value choices: Should decentralization be sacrificed for speed? Should powerful, privileged nodes be introduced for higher throughput? Should security assumptions be entrusted to a few for better user experience?

Ethereum’s answer is often a resounding no.

This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive vigilance against shortcuts; “can it be done” always defers to “should it be done.”

It is against this backdrop that “Alignment” has become one of the most contentious concepts recently. Some worry it might evolve into a moralistic label or even a tool for rent-seeking.

Indeed, such concerns are not unfounded. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin directly addressed this risk in “Making Ethereum Alignment Legible”:

“If ‘alignment’ means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has already failed.”

Vitalik’s proposed solution isn’t to abandon alignment but to make it explainable, decomposable, and debatable. In his view, alignment shouldn’t be a vague political stance but should be broken down into a set of examinable attributes:

• Technical Alignment: Does it utilize Ethereum’s security consensus? Does it uphold open-source principles and open standards?
• Economic Alignment: Does it consistently promote ETH’s value capture, rather than merely extracting from it?
• Spiritual Alignment: Does it pursue the common good, not just predatory growth?

From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test but a reciprocal, symbiotic social contract.

The Ethereum ecosystem permits chaos, competition, and even fierce internal rivalry among L2s; however, these activities should ultimately feed back into the mother network that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.

III. A Philosophical Dive into Decentralization and Censorship Resistance

If “alignment” defines value boundaries, then the true pillars supporting these boundaries are Ethereum’s long-standing commitments: decentralization and censorship resistance.

First, within the Ethereum context, “decentralization” doesn’t merely mean more nodes or that everyone must run a node. Instead, it signifies a system’s ability to function correctly without trusting any single participant.

This implies that the protocol should not rely on a specific sequencer, coordinator, or company. It also means that node operation costs should not be so high that only professional institutions can afford them, ensuring that ordinary individuals can still verify whether the system operates according to its rules.

For this reason, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware thresholds, bandwidth requirements, and state bloat, even if it slows down certain short-term performance metrics (further reading: “The Dawn of the ZK Roadmap: Is Ethereum’s Endgame Accelerating?“).

In Ethereum’s view, a fast system that cannot be verified by the average person fundamentally loses the essence of being “permissionless.”

Another frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance.

Ethereum does not assume a benevolent world. On the contrary, from its design inception, it assumes participants may be profit-driven, power may centralize, and external pressures will inevitably arise. Therefore, censorship resistance doesn’t demand that “no one will ever censor,” but rather ensures that even if someone attempts censorship, the system will not fail.

This is why Ethereum places such high importance on mechanisms like proposer/builder separation, decentralized building, and economic game theory design—not because they are elegant, but because they enable the system to continue functioning under the worst conditions.

In many discussions, people ask: “Will such extreme situations really happen in reality?”

But frankly, if a system is only secure in an ideal world, it is not worthy of trust in the real world.

Finally, an interesting data point: the Ethereum PoS staking withdrawal queue is almost entirely cleared, while the queue for new stakers continues to grow (exceeding 1.57 million ETH). Amidst debates and doubts, a significant amount of ETH is still being locked into this system for the long term.

This perhaps speaks louder than any declaration.

Concluding Thoughts

Many critics argue that Ethereum is always “discussing philosophy while others are already running.”

However, from another perspective, it is precisely these discussions that have prevented Ethereum from repeatedly starting from scratch. Whether it’s the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or initiatives like Interop, fast finality, and slot time reduction, they all fundamentally unfold under one premise:

All performance improvements must integrate with existing security and value assumptions.

This explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative yet robust.” Ultimately, it’s not that it doesn’t pursue efficiency, but that it refuses to trade future systemic risk for present short-term advantages.

And this is the underlying spirit that has sustained the Ethereum ecosystem for a decade—a rare and most valuable asset to protect in a Web3 era obsessed with “efficiency/TVL above all else.”

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(The above content is an authorized excerpt and reprint from our partner PANews. Original link | Source: imToken)