Using “America’s Failure” to Peep at the Risks of “Ether Path”

Author: Jerry, founder of ThePrimediaDAO

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In the thinking logic of "learning from the barbarians to control the barbarians", as a representative of the post-80s financial media, for a long time our cultural system and ideological cognition have a strong superiority of the "American spirit": democracy, freedom and human rights. In the reporting of major news events, we are also deliberately comparing the superiority of the American mechanism of separation of powers: the three national powers of legislation, administration and justice are held by different organs, each exercising independently and checking and balancing each other.

But with Bitcoin and the "crypto spirit", we gradually realize that there will be better governance mechanisms and social order in the process of human advancement to digitalization. Especially when the US government, which is "capital-controlled" behind the scenes, has torn off the fig leaf of "American civilization" and declared the failure of the "American spirit" by suppressing protesting college students on a large scale, it is necessary for us to re-examine the risks of the "Ethereum POS" path and the essence of the geek spirit in the crypto world.

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In recent days, demonstrations have broken out on college campuses in many parts of the United States, including several well-known institutions of higher learning, demanding a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the United States to stop military aid to Israel. The demands of college students are not radical, mainly targeting the school to draw a clear line with Israel, the school fund cannot invest in companies related to Israel, and completely withdraw from Israeli companies and companies that support Israel's invasion. In addition, students hope that the school will put pressure on the US government to contribute to the ceasefire in Gaza.

At about 4 a.m. local time on April 17, in front of the Butler Library of Columbia University in New York City, many students set up tents on the lawn and established the "Gaza Solidarity Camp." After hundreds of students were arrested by New York City police, many universities across the United States launched a large-scale solidarity movement, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, New York University, USC, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Like any "justice" in the development of human history, intellectuals paid a heavy price in the pursuit of justice. The attitudes of the top leaders of the United States and Israel are basically the same regarding the demonstrations and protests by American college students. Biden said that this blatant "anti-Semitism" should be condemned, U.S. House Speaker Johnson denounced them as "anti-Semitic thugs", and Trump called it a shame and it was all Biden's fault. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu issued a statement saying that what happened on the campuses of American universities was terrible, and "anti-Semitic thugs" occupied first-class universities.

On the morning of the 25th local time, more schools joined the protest, including the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Cornell University, UCLA, Princeton University... Although some American politicians labeled the demonstrators "anti-Semitic" and suppressed them forcefully, the protest movement is still intensifying.

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Since 2020, with the progress of the encryption ecology brought about by the DeFi bull market, including the basic functions of NFT, the governance mechanism of DAO, and the efficiency improvement of Layer2... People began to imagine the arrival of the blockchain application era and the order of the metaverse digital civilization.

In the wave of AI bringing a new revolution to the productivity of human society, we also integrate AI elements into the narrative of "AI and Web3 in the metaverse" - the best way to get along with AI is the narrative of "AI and Web3 in the metaverse": AI provides computing power and forms intelligent network application scenarios, and blockchain/Web3 establishes order for AI (intelligent network). Without this narrative, the final destination of humans and AI will be a showdown between carbon-based life and silicon-based life.

In this narrative, we are also full of longing for the advancement of human digitalization. We gather the power of technology and industry to build the metaverse space. If the metaverse space is just a highly immersive digital space, is it all worth it? Reconstructing the digital society with blockchain/Web3 decentralization, Token incentive mechanism and DAO organizational governance, giving human evolution a better social system and governance structure, is worthy of human beings to gather the power of technology and industry to build the digital space and look forward to the metaverse world. Therefore, this metaverse scenario will be even more grand than V God's decentralized society (DeSoc).

But the failure of the United States has warned us that human governance is far more complex and dangerous than smart networks. Even the separation of powers, even democracy and the rule of law, will be eliminated by the government controlled by capital.

The crypto world is facing the same danger. At the beginning of Ethereum's transformation to POS, ThePrimedia wrote an article "Stick to the Logic of PoW: Analysis of the Legality and Feasibility of Ethereum Merge Hard Fork" to remind us that if we do not stop it, then more than ten years after the advent of Bitcoin, the impossible triangle of the blockchain world will be "solved" - at the cost of giving up decentralization, it will completely become a mediocre financial game that is no different from Wall Street. Since Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto's imagination of "opening a window and letting out a beam of light" for the world will also disappear.

Instead of calculating the gains and losses after switching to POS, it is better to think carefully about what happened - why do we applaud the trend of centralization? Signs that the urgency and importance of the concept of decentralization need to be re-emphasized are already emerging.

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We are co-researching and co-creating with the DAO mechanism and incubating the Web3 media protocol on this basis. We are also involved in community-governed blockchain projects. These practical experiences and thinking summaries will give us a better perspective to peek into the risks of the "Ether Path" from the "failure of the United States."

While we are grateful for the capital brought by the Bitcoin ETF, the crypto world itself is also paving the way for "capital control". This is extremely dangerous. Fortunately, the efforts of Bitcoin's second layer and the practice of cross-chain interoperability are providing the crypto world with better options besides the "Ether Path".

Of course, there are still doubts in the market: Bitcoin faces obstacles in expanding its use cases and scalability, and some other EVMs are pseudo-Bitcoin second layers. How to improve Bitcoin's scalability, security, and cross-chain capabilities, promote the issuance of secure assets and cross-chain experience across heterogeneous blockchains, especially to ensure Bitcoin's scalability without changing its consensus rules, and promote fast and secure Bitcoin second-layer development and interoperability is necessary and urgent.

Today, whether in the physical world or the crypto world, we are in an era of rapid change and development. In the physical world, the spirit and system of the United States are in decline. Terms such as open source, geeks, encryption, DAO, decentralization, AI, quantum, interstellar immigration, metaverse, and decentralization continue to emerge and iterate human cognitive and behavioral patterns.

In the narrative of "AI and Web3 in the metaverse", a group of new era preachers, leaders, and promoters will be born.