My thoughts today is that economics is essential to Ethereum protocol because it’s used as a powerful tool to defend the value that Ethereum built upon: decentralization. But it’s by no means the end of our imagination on Ethereum. (Thread)

I am reading Vitalik’s “Credible Neutrality As A Guiding Principle”, and this sentence “essentially, a mechanism is an algorithm plus incentives” caught my eye.

This is interesting since I want to take algorithm here as machine like thing, which here I see machine as a set of mathematical rules, and incentives here as mathematical assumptions of human nature, which is also machine like nature of human beings.

In Ethereum’s  minimalistic design, economics is at the core. But it’s not seen as the goal, it’s should marks the beginning of Ethereum’s potential and our imagination of Ethereum.

And the conclusion is that in Ethereum protocol, economics is a powerful tool to defend this human-computer collective, or system. But it’s not meant to be a powerful tool to extract value from this system.