Beyond the dilemma of "moral kidnapping": Ethereum's ten-year moat of steadfast defense

When you take a closer look at the Ethereum community, you’ll notice a subtle yet continuously spreading sense of anxiety. The heated debates around technical topics such as architecture splitting, outsourcing execution, and cross-chain interoperability, along with emotional confrontations over “why not be more aggressive” and “is the foundation arrogant,” all seem to be opposing voices on the surface. In reality, they all point to the same deep dilemma: during disputes, people often fall into the trap of reducing value judgments to moral coercion. The true choice for Ethereum lies precisely in maintaining a system philosophy that is harder to understand but more worth exploring, amidst this noise.

Misread “Degeneration”: Why Extreme Performance Masks System Risks

The most frequent criticisms of Ethereum often stem from a superficial perception—it seems less “aggressive” than emerging public chains. While Solana continuously breaks TPS limits, Sui optimizes user experience, and other new chains set new benchmarks, Ethereum keeps iterating on architecture, discussing ordering mechanisms, and optimizing state management. This leads some observers to conclude: Ethereum is in decline.

But this conclusion overlooks a often ignored fact—over nearly a decade of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or rollback. This is not luck but a result of design choices. Many newer public chains have taken a more direct route: reducing node counts, raising hardware requirements, centralizing ordering and execution to achieve short-term peak performance. However, such speed often comes at the expense of system resilience.

In contrast, Ethereum from its initial design faced a more difficult question: as participation increases, scale expands, and external environments become more uncertain, can this system still operate normally? The difficulty of this question explains why Ethereum appears “slow”—not because the technology cannot achieve higher speeds, but because it prioritizes reliability under worst-case scenarios.

In other words, what is called “degeneration” is actually Ethereum proactively accepting short-term discomfort and doubts for the sake of longer-term survival.

“Alignment” Is Not a Loyalty Test, But a Boundary of Mutual Benefit and Coexistence

Because of this, understanding Ethereum requires accepting an unappealing but crucial fact: its core goal is not to pursue “maximized efficiency,” but to remain trustworthy even in the harshest conditions. This leads many seemingly purely technical issues to be fundamentally value choices—should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce powerful nodes to increase throughput? Should security assumptions be entrusted to a few to optimize user experience?

The Ethereum community’s answers to these questions are often negative. This also explains why within the community, there is almost instinctive caution toward any shortcut solutions. “Can it be done” is always less important than “should it be done.”

Against this backdrop, the concept of “Alignment” has recently sparked considerable controversy. Some fear it could evolve into vague moral coercion, becoming a tool for power judgment. These concerns are not unfounded. As early as the second half of 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in “Making Ethereum alignment legible.” His proposed solution is not to abandon the concept of alignment but to make it explainable, decomposable, and discussable—so it does not become a vague political stance, but is broken down into specific, reviewable attributes:

Technical alignment involves whether Ethereum’s security consensus is used and whether open standards are supported; economic alignment concerns whether it promotes long-term ETH value capture rather than one-way extraction; spiritual alignment examines whether it pursues public interest rather than predatory growth.

From this perspective, alignment is fundamentally a mutual benefit and coexistence social contract, not a loyalty test. The Ethereum ecosystem allows chaos, competition, and fierce rivalry among Layer 2s, but all these activities should ultimately feed back into the underlying layer that provides security, consensus, and settlement.

Decentralization and Censorship Resistance: Ethereum’s Dual Defense Lines

The boundaries set by “alignment” are truly supported by Ethereum’s long-standing two pillars: decentralization and censorship resistance.

In the context of Ethereum, decentralization is not simply “more nodes are better” or “everyone should run a node.” Its true meaning is that the system can operate normally without relying on any single participant. This means the protocol cannot depend on a specific sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means that the cost of running nodes must remain affordable for ordinary people, ensuring that regular users can verify whether the system follows the established rules.

Therefore, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth consumption, and state bloat—even if this slows down some short-term performance metrics. To Ethereum, a system that is extremely fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has fundamentally lost the true meaning of “permissionless.”

Another often misunderstood value is censorship resistance. Ethereum does not assume the world is inherently friendly. On the contrary, from its inception, it presumes participants may seek profit, power may concentrate, and external pressures will inevitably occur. Therefore, censorship resistance does not mean “no one will ever censor,” but rather that even if censorship occurs, the system will not be paralyzed.

This explains why Ethereum places such importance on Proposer/Builder separation, decentralized construction, and sophisticated economic game design—not because they are aesthetically elegant, but because they enable the system to continue functioning normally under the worst conditions. Some may ask, “Do such extreme scenarios really happen in reality?” but this question itself overlooks a fundamental truth: if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it is not worth carrying value in the real world.

Seeing Confidence in Staking Growth

Finally, a thought-provoking data point. When the Ethereum community faces various disputes and doubts, the queue for staking withdrawals in PoS nearly empties, while the queue for staking continues to grow, with over 1.57 million ETH being locked long-term into this system.

This phenomenon speaks louder than any declaration. Amid external criticism and internal disagreements, a large amount of capital still chooses to commit long-term to this value system. This precisely proves that the philosophy Ethereum upholds is being validated through actual market and community actions.

Conclusion: Holding Firm Is More Difficult Than Innovating

Many critics point out that Ethereum often “discusses philosophy while waiting for others to catch up.” But from another perspective, it is precisely these seemingly lengthy discussions that help Ethereum avoid cycles of repeatedly tearing down and rebuilding. Whether it is the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual integration of ZK technology, or plans like Interop, fast finality, and slot shortening, all these evolutions are based on a premise: any performance improvements must be compatible with existing security and value assumptions.

This also explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative on the surface but steady in essence.” Ultimately, it is not that Ethereum does not pursue efficiency, but that it refuses to exchange short-term gains for future systemic risks. This persistence is the underlying spirit that has supported Ethereum through ten years—also the most scarce and valuable thing to protect in this era of “efficiency/TVL supremacy” within the Web3 ecosystem.

Among all competitors rushing to iterate quickly and expand rapidly, Ethereum’s choice may seem conservative, but it is this restraint that prevents it from becoming a compromise under moral coercion, and instead makes it a truly trustworthy, verifiable, and long-term committed system.