Vitalik reiterates Ethereum's mission: to reduce external dependency vulnerabilities through resilience, allowing people to gain sovereign freedom

On January 6, Ethereum founder Vitalik published an article reiterating Ethereum's mission, saying, "The creation of Ethereum is not meant to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to allow people to gain freedom." This is an important and controversial phrase from the "Unpermissioned Declaration" that deserves our re-examination and better understanding of its meaning. Words like "efficient" and "convenient" imply improving the average situation in an already quite good context. Efficiency means allowing the world's best engineers to invest their souls, reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience means allowing people to click once instead of three times, reducing registration time from 1 minute to 20 seconds. These things may be great to achieve. But we must understand that we can never outdo the corporate players in Silicon Valley in this game.

Therefore, the main underlying game Ethereum plays must be a different game. This game is resilience. Resilience is not about 4.5% APY versus 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 application developers go bankrupt or disappear, or Cloudflare goes down, or a cyberwar breaks out, your 2000 milliseconds of latency remains at 2000 milliseconds. Resilience is that anyone, anywhere in the world can access the network and become a top participant.

Resilience is sovereignty, in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—actively reducing vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be arbitrarily stripped away at any time, that is the game Ethereum is suited to win. Ethereum must first and foremost be a decentralized, permissionless, and resilient block space—then let it flourish. $BTC #比特币2026年价格预测