Beyond luck testing: Why Ethereum's ten-year moat refuses to take shortcuts

Over the past period, the Ethereum community has been filled with a subtle sense of unease. On one side are intense discussions about technical topics such as Rollup architecture, ZK, PBS, Slot shortening, and other innovations; on the other side are heated debates around questions like “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?”, “Why not be more aggressive?”, and “Why is the token price sluggish?”. These seemingly distant issues actually point to the same fundamental question—what does Ethereum really want to become?

This is not a technical disagreement but a clash of values. Many critics cannot understand why, after other public chains have already “gotten up and running,” Ethereum still repeatedly discusses what constitutes a “luck test” or the worst-case scenarios. But it is precisely this obsession that has made Ethereum the most difficult system to replicate in the crypto world.

Why the “Luck Test” Explains Ethereum’s Choices

Recently, discussions about Ethereum “degeneration” are not uncommon. High-performance public chains continuously break new records in TPS, TVL, and latency metrics, while Ethereum keeps revisiting architecture splits, execution outsourcing, and interoperability issues. This may seem neither intuitive nor “smart.”

But if you look back ten years, you’ll find a fact most people overlook: In nearly a decade of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or rollback, maintaining uninterrupted 7×24×365 uptime.

This is not luck.

Many emerging high-performance chains have chosen a more direct path—reducing node counts, raising hardware requirements, centralizing ordering and execution—to achieve maximum performance. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but Ethereum’s choice has been different: from the very beginning, it asked a harder question—When the network scales up, with more participants and a less friendly environment, can this system still operate?

This is the core of the luck test: whether a system can remain stable in the worst conditions without relying on “good luck.” It tests the system’s resilience, not its performance ceiling.

Because of this, the so-called “ten-year itch” is not about Ethereum degenerating but about it proactively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for the sake of longer-term survival. In other words, Ethereum is not incapable of faster performance; it is always asking itself: Is speed worth trading off systemic risk?

Alignment Is Not Loyalty, But a Systemic Luck Test

The first step to understanding Ethereum is accepting a somewhat unappealing but crucial fact: Ethereum’s core goal is not maximum efficiency but “remaining trustworthy in the worst case.”

Under this premise, many debates that seem technical are fundamentally about value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce powerful nodes for higher throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a few entities for better user experience?

Ethereum’s answer is often no.

In this context, “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently. Some worry it might become a political tool, but Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out the risk in his September 2024 article “Making Ethereum alignment legible”—if “alignment” means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has already failed.

His proposed solution is to make alignment explainable, decomposable, and discussable, breaking it down into three reviewable attributes:

Technical Alignment: Do you use Ethereum’s security consensus? Do you support open source and open standards?

Economic Alignment: Do you promote long-term value capture of ETH rather than one-way extraction?

Ideological Alignment: Do you pursue public interest rather than predatory growth?

From this perspective, alignment is essentially a mutually beneficial luck test—it examines whether, amid competition, internal rivalry, and self-interest, participants will still give back to the core system that provides security and settlement. The ecosystem allows competition and fierce internal dynamics among L2s, but ultimately, these activities should pass this “alignment test.”

Decentralization and Censorship Resistance: The Two Pillars of the Luck Test

If alignment defines the value boundary, then what truly sustains this boundary are Ethereum’s two long-standing pillars: Decentralization and Censorship Resistance.

In the Ethereum context, decentralization does not mean more nodes are always better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. Its true meaning is: The system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This implies that the protocol should not rely on a single proposer or coordinator; also, node operation costs should not be so high that only professional institutions can participate. Therefore, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth, and state bloat—even if this slows down some short-term performance metrics. To Ethereum, a system that is very fast but cannot be verified by ordinary users essentially loses the meaning of “permissionless.”

Another often misunderstood value is censorship resistance. Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. Instead, from the outset, it presumes participants may seek profit, power may concentrate, and external pressures will inevitably arise. Therefore, censorship resistance does not mean “no one will ever censor,” but rather that even if someone attempts to censor, the system will not fail.

This is why Ethereum attaches great importance to mechanisms like Proposer/Builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic game design—not because they are elegant, but because they enable continued operation in the worst-case scenarios. These are concrete implementations of the luck test.

Some may ask: do such extreme scenarios really happen in reality? But at the end of the day, if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it’s not trustworthy in the real world.

Data Speaks: Stakers’ Choices

Most interestingly, amidst various controversies and doubts, there is a phenomenon often overlooked—currently, the queue of stakers exiting Ethereum PoS is nearly empty, while the queue entering staking continues to grow, with the amount of ETH locked still increasing.

Despite market noise, many participants choose to lock ETH long-term into this system. Behind this is a form of voting—believing that a system capable of operating in the worst conditions is more trustworthy in the long run.

Final Words

Many critics say Ethereum is always “discussing philosophy after others have already succeeded.” But from another perspective, it is precisely these seemingly inefficient discussions that have prevented Ethereum from repeatedly starting over.

Whether it’s the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or interoperability, fast finality, and Slot shortening—all are based on a fundamental premise: All performance improvements must pass the existing security and value luck tests.

This explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative yet steady.” Ultimately, it’s not that Ethereum does not pursue efficiency, but that it refuses to exchange current short-term advantages for future systemic risks.

And this obsession is the underlying spirit that has supported Ethereum’s ecosystem through ten years—also the most scarce and precious thing to protect in an era dominated by “efficiency/TVL first.”