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maurelian
@maurelian.eth
Thoughts on the tradeoffs of complexity and community building: Nick Szabo has criticized Ethereum’s complexity using the concept of an “argument surface”. Similar to an attack surface, the argument surface expands with the number of that people can spend time quibbling over. This can bog down a community, and/or open it up to capture. "Governance minimization" requires reducing the argument surface. https://x.com/NickSzabo4/status/1068960876416258049
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maurelian
@maurelian.eth
There is a lot of merit to that idea, but I also think that it misses the powerful flipside, which I like to call the “participation surface”. The participation surface grows with the number of ways that people can get involved in building something. To grow your community you need to grow your participation surface, while also making sure that the surface is spread out enough. You need the right amount of surface in the consensus layer, the app layer, the culture layer, etc. Ethereum has done an excellent job of exposing many ways for people to bring their various skills to bear on building both the tech and the ecosystem.
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maurelian
@maurelian.eth
Optimism has taken it a step further by figuring out how to directly reward those efforts, which then further increases the participation surface, ie. you can now argue about how to allocate rewards! This is risky but works well if you can get it right. Moreover, the modularity of the OP Stack is very conducive to spreading out the participation surface. It means that you have participation in the surface in the proofs, in the bridge, in the CL, in the EL, etc, etc. and the people working on those different things can generally work away happily without getting in each other's way.
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