ETH2 is dead, Ethereum saves its respect

Vitalik 2025-10-14 19:24 52295人围观 ETH

The overnight pie (BTC) is stable in the 36-37k range. There is a popular saying that you don’t know who has been swimming naked until the tide goes out. Filecoin, which we have approved, has fallen to a record low (except for the initial price when the currency was listed), and has dropped 92.5% from the record high of nearly 240 dollars (2020/10/15 article "Filecoin mainnet is online, who is it and who has been cut off?" 》). The ICP we once approved has fallen into the dust. There is no lowest, only lower. It has fallen 98.7% from the historical high of 1,555 dollars after the opening (2021/5/11 article "Trillion at the Opening"). We have also discussed our views on ETH expansion in the third section of the article "Three Prophecies" on December 20, 2020: "I believe that the original eth2 vision and route are likely to fail and will be forced to change the technical route. ”
On January 24, 2022, the day before yesterday, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it would officially abolish the terms ETH2 (Ethereum 2.0) and ETH1, replacing them with "consensus layer" and "execution layer" [1]. This is a move that has been planned for a long time and is called the great renaming. As early as 2021/12/4 "The Great Merger: Ethereum's Patriotic War!" "The article talked about the new roadmap of Ethereum given by Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum. At that time, we already knew that the roadmap of Ethereum had changed.
At the end of last year, Vitalik posted a slide from Ethereum’s roadshow that year. The plan given above was to achieve 2.0 around 2015. Eight years have passed, and 2.0 has not been realized, but is gone. The original idea of ETH2 was to learn from the sharding architecture technology of the Internet back-end and split one chain into multiple chains. However, friends who have done Internet back-end development know that sharding itself is not difficult to deal with the transaction consistency problem of blockchain processing. What is difficult is how to achieve distributed transactions across shards after sharding.
For example, a stand-alone system is like humans living in a warm and humid habitable zone, a large-scale Internet distributed system is like building a human settlement in the desert, and ETH2's blockchain sharding is close to Musk's Mars colonization plan. When we can't move people well to deserts, seabeds, underground and other spaces, we propose to immigrate to Mars. Not only is the technology difficult, it is also easy to be suspected of using a grand and almost impossible vision to continuously collect money.
In the last cycle, many smart contract public chains emerged trying to challenge Ethereum. However, the hottest thing that year was attacking Bitcoin’s forked chains. With the arrival of a bear market winter, these challengers fell silent. When time fast forwards to the starting point of this bull market at the end of 2020, the so-called "new public chains" are gearing up and eager to challenge Ethereum again.
Amid internal and external troubles, Ethereum has murderous intentions in its heart.
On the one hand, it is a knife to oneself. The ETH2 route, which has never been implemented for ten thousand years, was abandoned, and at the same time, several "placebo" pills were planned to be released to the community. The first one is the peak of the first wave of hype in March and April 2021. When Ethereum encountered dual pressures of intensifying congestion and rising prices (both of which will lead to excessive usage fees and user losses), Vitalik "threatened" to remove the SELFDESTRUCT operation code and eliminate gas arbitrage, thereby reducing congestion.
The second one is the London upgrade implemented in the hard fork in early August (see the 2021/8/3 article "Ethereum's "Fee to Tax""), which introduced EIP-1559, expanded the block, changed the gas fee model, and introduced gas burning.
The third one is to vow to promote PoS consensus in the first half of 2022 and eliminate PoW mining. Maybe in the eyes of Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation, the mining mechanism and financial model may be more important than expansion, right?
However, these two and three are actually "random and eggless". Giving up the hope of "executing sharding" means that the treasure of expansion has actually been completely bet on the second-layer rollup. However, if layer-1 cannot completely reduce the gas by several orders of magnitude, the gas of layer-2 can be one order of magnitude lower than that of layer-1, but it is still more than two orders of magnitude higher than that of competitor new public chains! Vitalik still has to think a lot about how to fight this battle.
On the other hand, it is a knife to the market. The method is to smash the plate to cool down. As pointed out in the article "Three Prophecies", "There is an endogenous self-limiting contradiction between the price of ETH and the ecological prosperity it carries. Therefore, this is destined that the price (unit price) of ETH needs to be stable." But what we didn't expect was that the way to "stabilize" prices was to achieve it by smashing the market. On May 17, 2021, two days before the 519 plunge, under Vitalik’s suggestion, the Ethereum Foundation decisively shipped 35,000 Ethereums below $4,000.
After the 519 plummet, the gas fee dropped by an order of magnitude, which was extremely refreshing. With the launch of EIP-1559 burning gas in August, Ethereum, which fell below $1,500 at a low, once again launched an upward attack, convincing Leek with its increase. When Ethereum reached a new high in early November and the market entered the second wave of hype, Ethereum's congestion and price rise once again encountered the "Davis Double Kill". So on November 21, the Ethereum Foundation made another decisive move above $4,000, shipping 20,000 Ethereum. [2]
Both shipments by the Ethereum Foundation confirmed strong bearish signals, triggering selling by a large number of large currency holders and causing a collapse in market price levels. So far, the price of Ethereum has once again fallen below $2,500, which has played a role in cooling down and "stabilizing" currency prices, as we pointed out above. (The Ethereum Foundation and the founding team both have a large amount of free Ethereum allocated that year, please read the reference [3] for details)
Moreover, the lower it falls, the better the rise will be. When the merge completes PoS, how to prove the "greatness" of Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation? Of course it's pull pan. If we go from the high of nearly 5,000 knives a year ago to 10,000 knives, it will be difficult and the effect is not good. If the increase is only 1 times, the leeks will not be excited at all. And if the market is smashed first, hitting 2,500 dollars, and then with the implementation of the great renaming and the merge, it is suddenly pulled to 10,000 dollars, which is 4 times or even expected to reach a higher increase, then the persuasiveness of the leek will be several times the effect. Ethereum can successfully restore the dignity of the first smart contract public chain.
Just like in the real world, the truth is only within the range of the cannon. In the world of digital currency, the level of technical excellence is only proportional to the pull multiple. As long as you pull the pan well, trash can be turned into treasure. Anyway, Liek's cognitive level is really well controlled by Vitalik. Otherwise, why would he be called "V God"? Don’t accept it!
As for PoS, does it actually have any effect on capacity expansion and gas reduction? Who really cares amid the price surge carnival?
What's more, the above are all trivial matters, not worth mentioning. The most despicable thing is that some representatives of Ethereum stabbed Bitcoin PoW in the back at the U.S. Congressional hearing.
Jules, an Ethereum developer and PoS advocate, participated in the U.S. Congressional hearing on Bitcoin mining and energy issues on January 20. At the hearing, as a spokesman for altcoins, he openly attacked PoW (Proof-of-Work) mining and stabbed Bitcoin in the back. Although Ethereum is about to switch to PoS, hasn't it still benefited from PoW in the past few years and even now? Citing a paper he co-wrote back in 1999, he said PoW mining itself is a waste. He then called for the adoption of a PoS consensus mechanism, saying it would use far less electricity. [4]
Regarding this fallacy, I don’t want to write one more word to refute it. Readers and friends can read my article on 2021/2/13 "Mining electricity is not a waste, not having Bitcoin is a waste". As Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out in a forum post on August 7, 2010: “Gold mining is a waste, but this waste is far less than the utility of using gold as a medium of exchange. I think the same is true for Bitcoin. Bitcoin enables transactions whose utility will far exceed the cost of electricity. ”
Picking up the bowl to eat, putting down the chopsticks to curse, outsiders in foreign wars and insiders in civil wars, standing in the trenches of cryptocurrency versus the traditional world, stabbing comrades in the same trenches, this chilling value system is the real internal injury of Ethereum.

参考资料：- [1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming/- [2] https://twitter.com/edwardmorra_btc/status/1458889673275756554- [3] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/11/sale-of-the-century-the-inside-story-of-ethereums-2014-premine/- [4] https://compassmining.io/education/three-takeaways-from-the-us-congressional-hearing/
(Public account: Liu Jiaolian. Knowledge Planet: The official account replied to "Planet") (Disclaimer: None of the content in this article constitutes any investment advice. Cryptocurrency is an extremely high-risk product and may return to zero at any time. Please participate with caution and be responsible for yourself. )