Vitalik reaffirms Ethereum's original mission: freedom and resilience are the games we should pursue

【Blockchain Rhythm】On January 6th, Ethereum founder Vitalik once again spoke out to elaborate on Ethereum’s core mission. He clearly stated that Ethereum was not born to pursue financial efficiency or application convenience, but to defend human freedom.

This viewpoint touches on many people’s reflections. What are “efficiency” and “convenience”? Vitalik’s interpretation is straightforward—efficiency means enabling top engineers to dedicate their efforts, reducing response latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing annualized returns from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about simplifying operational processes, allowing users to click three times instead of once, and shortening registration time from 1 minute to 20 seconds. These optimizations sound very appealing, but the reality is: we can never outplay the tech giants of Silicon Valley.

Therefore, Ethereum should play a completely different game—resilience.

Resilience is not about comparing yields, but about minimizing the risk of losing all principal. It means that even if your account is frozen due to political reasons, even if the application developer goes bankrupt and disappears, even if the network service provider crashes, or even if the internet erupts into cyber warfare, your digital assets and access rights remain stable. Resilience is about enabling anyone, anywhere on Earth, to participate and use this network equally.

Ultimately, resilience is sovereignty—a form of “digital sovereignty.” It requires us to proactively reduce the risk exposure from external dependencies, as those dependencies can be revoked at any time. Ethereum’s mission is to first become a decentralized, permissionless, resilient blockchain space, before talking about other rich applications.