Vitalik reiterates Ethereum's mission: to reduce external dependency vulnerabilities through resilience, enabling people to achieve sovereignty and freedom

On January 6th, Ethereum founder Vitalik reiterated the core purpose of Ethereum: “Ethereum was not created to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to give people freedom.” This is an important and controversial statement from the “Declaration of Trustlessness,” which warrants our re-examination and better understanding of its meaning. The words “efficient” and “convenient” imply improvements in already quite good scenarios. Efficiency refers to having the world’s best engineers pour their souls into reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience means enabling people to click once instead of three times, reducing registration time from 1 minute to 20 seconds. These achievements may be impressive. But we must understand that we can never outplay Silicon Valley’s corporate players in this game. Therefore, the main underlying game Ethereum plays must be different. This game is resilience. Resilience is not about comparing 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY, but about minimizing the risk of suffering -100% APY. Resilience means that if you become politically unpopular and get censored, or your app developer goes bankrupt or disappears, or Cloudflare crashes, or internet cyber warfare erupts, your 2000 milliseconds latency still remains at 2000 milliseconds. Resilience is that anyone, anywhere in the world can access the network and become a top participant. Resilience is sovereignty—“digital sovereignty” or “food sovereignty” in the sense of sovereignty—actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies, which can 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 blockchain space—and then make it rich.