Hardness & @Ethereum 101 Ethereum’s distinctive property is hardness. We usually talk about Ethereum’s core properties as things like “decentralized trust”, censorship resistance, digital property rights, or credible neutrality. All of these depend on a common property: that Ethereum will behave reliably. That it can make credible commitments about the future: - That your funds will remain accessible to you even if you don’t touch them for years - That your smart contract will execute as written - That a transaction you send today or a year from now cannot be censored - That your private transaction will remain private - That Ethereum itself will not be captured, and will remain credibly neutral Hardness is the root property that enables all of them. It is the irreducible “bit” of trust, the basic capability of a system to make credible claims about future behaviour. Hardness is what makes blockchains valuable Because Ethereum is sufficiently hard, it can be used as a platform for systems that require reliability and trustworthiness. Things like: - Money and assets - Contracts and complex financial structures - Identity systems - Governance - Payment and savings systems - Enduring art & culture Web2 was built on flimsy foundations, because it relied on companies that rose and fell, shut down platforms, or changed the rules underneath us. Ethereum has helped to strengthen the web, like steel rebar woven into cement. Web3 is an internet that can be a reliable foundation for anyone to build on top of. Hardness helps us understand Ethereum's place in the world Hardness isn't new. But the invention of blockchains like Ethereum helps us see it more clearly. We also rely on institutions and atoms as sources of hardness, and have for millennia. Institutions like governments & legal systems can be reliable and predictable, enabling property rights, democratic institutions, and contract law. Atoms and other basic properties of our world also work as a source of hardness. Gold serves as money because its supply is limited on earth, and not because of the rules of some institution. The idea of hardness helps us compare these systems against each other. It helps people outside of crypto see that blockchains are just a new way of doing an old thing, something so familiar to us that we didn't really have a word for it. It makes it easier to explain the value blockchains like Ethereum offer the world: they are a new source of hardness, with new valuable properties that offer us new choices. - Ethereum is a decentralized source of hardness. It is not under the control of any centralized institution like a company, VC, or government. - Ethereum is global. Anyone with an internet connection can use it. Ethereum and the network of L2s built on top of it will form a seamless, interoperable platform for hardness. - Ethereum is transparent and auditable. We can verify, instead of naively trusting. Anyone can validate the chain using simple tools. Every year, those tools will become easier and faster until almost any device can reach out and touch Ethereum’s hardened surface for itself. - Ethereum’s hardness does not depend on the political winds. Ethereum’s contracts and property rights don’t stop working if your government does. Ethereum’s data won’t be taken away from you by a change to a corporation’s ToS. When that matters, it matters a lot. Ethereum will not replace all other sources of hardness. But it will compete with and complement them. For the first time in a long time, we have new materials we can use to build our economies and societies. Just as an architect must carefully plan not only the design of a building, but also the materials used to construct that design, so must we carefully consider the materials we use to build our civilization’s infrastructure. What do we want our civilization to be made of?