Credible Neutrality - The Daily Gwei #229
If the platform isn't credibly neutral then it's not gonna make it.
Almost 18 months ago Vitalik published a blog post titled ‘Credible Neutrality As A Guiding Principle’ on the Nakamoto website. This post describes the concept of ‘credible neutrality’ which Vitalik defines as a “mechanism that does not discriminate for or against any specific people.”
It’s quite obvious that Ethereum is the perfect example of a credibly neutral platform. It is decentralized, censorship-resistant and most importantly, permissionless to use and build on. The network itself does not discriminate against any individual or group, it does not favor one company over another and it is not aligned with any nation state or government. The most critical aspect of this is that all of these properties are publicly verifiable because the Ethereum network is open source and anyone can run the node software on their own hardware.
Ethereum’s credible neutrality gives it many advantages over its “competitor” networks. Think about it - institutions like Coinbase are never going to directly support something like Binance Smart Chain (BSC) because BSC is not credibly neutral and the growth of the network directly benefits one party (Binance). On the other hand, Coinbase can comfortably support Ethereum without worrying about giving an advantage to either a single entity or even a handful of them. This doesn’t just apply to exchanges - it also applies to all products and services that want to hook into the Ethereum network for one reason or another. And the best thing is that all of this even applies to Ethereum competitors - Binance still supports Ethereum in various ways even though I’m sure they would prefer not to.
All of this will also greatly aid Ethereum’s adoption among traditional institutions in the “old world”. This is because Ethereum will allow these institutions to interoperate with each-other on neutral ground just like the internet has because the “internet” itself does not have an owner and adoption of the internet does not benefit any one party - it is (mostly) a neutral platform. I believe that what the internet did for information, Ethereum will do for money and finance which makes it even more important that Ethereum remain a credibly neutral platform.
I believe credibly neutral platforms will win over the long-term because they work to align incentives in such an elegant way. It’s hard to imagine a reality where a credibly neutral platform loses when even the platforms “enemies” are forced into supporting it for their own selfish reasons. Who knows - maybe Ethereum becomes the “great equalizer” of all the world’s value one day - we’ll see!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.