Ethereum: Death Through Economic Abstraction?
发布时间：2018-09-06 15:17:09 发布人：TokenString
Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jeremy Rubin caused quite the stir last
week when he declared the collapse of Ethereum to be inevitable. In a
TechCrunch article that appeared on Sept. 2, Rubin argued that Ethereum’s scalability
issues and failure to adopt more secure contract authoring practices
would eventually lead ether to be upstaged by its competitors. Ethereum
co-founder Vitalik Buterin took to Reddit on Monday to issue a lengthy
response to the article.
Death by Economic Abstraction
The core of Rubin’s argument centers on “economic abstraction,” a
term used by the Ethereum community to describe gas payments in a
non-ETH asset. Economic abstraction is basically paying smart contract
fees through an ERC-20 token instead of Ethereum. In Rubin’s view,
allowing smart contract fees to be paid in ERC-20 tokens will eventually
make Ethereum redundant, leading to its price collapse.
To illustrate this point, he used the example of “BuzzwordCoin,” a
fictional decentralized application that will pay gas in ether.
According to Rubin, requiring every BuzzwordCoin transaction to also
depend on Ethereum for fees creates significant risk, third party
dependency and downward pressure on the underlying token price. In other
words, if a user had to sell BuzzwordCoin for ether ahead of time to
facilitate a BuzzwordCoin transaction, then the selling will happen
before the transaction needs it.
Rubin adds the following:
“Instead of paying for Gas in ETH, we could make every BuzzwordCoin
transaction deposit a small amount of BuzzwordCoin directly to the
block’s miner’s address to pay for the contract’s execution. Paying for
Gas in a non-ETH asset is sometimes referred to as economic abstraction in the Ethereum community.”
Vitalik Responds
In a lengthy Reddit response, Vitalik Buterin partially agreed with Rubin’s analysis but said Ethereum is “likely not doing “full economic abstraction.””
“In Ethereum as it presently exists, this is absolutely true, and in
fact, if Ethereum were not to change, all parts of the author’s argument
(except the part about proof of stake, which would not even apply to
Ethereum as it is today) would be correct.”
To address economic abstraction, Buterin clarified that developers
are considering two proposals that require ETH to be paid at the
protocol level. The two proposals – modified fee market and storage
maintenance fees – would basically make gas payments in ether mandatory.
Buterin said economic abstraction can still happen at the user level but block proposers would still need to “cough up ETH.”
ETH/USD Price Update
Ethereum declined sharply on Wednesday as part of a wider market
pullback. At the time of writing, the ether price was down 9.9% at $259,
according to CoinMarketCap. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market
cap briefly traded above $300 over the weekend but was unable to hold
that critical level. The panic sale has put ether at a weekly loss of
more than 11%.
Disclaimer: The author owns bitcoin, Ethereum and other
cryptocurrencies. He holds investment positions in the coins, but does
not engage in short-term or day-trading.
Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jeremy Rubin caused quite the stir last week when he declared the collapse of Ethereum to be inevitable. In a TechCrunch article that appeared on Sept. 2, Rubin argued that Ethereum’s scalability issues and failure to adopt more secure contract authoring practices would eventually lead ether to be upstaged by its competitors. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin took to Reddit on Monday to issue a lengthy response to the article.
Death by Economic Abstraction
The core of Rubin’s argument centers on “economic abstraction,” a term used by the Ethereum community to describe gas payments in a non-ETH asset. Economic abstraction is basically paying smart contract fees through an ERC-20 token instead of Ethereum. In Rubin’s view, allowing smart contract fees to be paid in ERC-20 tokens will eventually make Ethereum redundant, leading to its price collapse.
To illustrate this point, he used the example of “BuzzwordCoin,” a fictional decentralized application that will pay gas in ether. According to Rubin, requiring every BuzzwordCoin transaction to also depend on Ethereum for fees creates significant risk, third party dependency and downward pressure on the underlying token price. In other words, if a user had to sell BuzzwordCoin for ether ahead of time to facilitate a BuzzwordCoin transaction, then the selling will happen before the transaction needs it.
Rubin adds the following:
“Instead of paying for Gas in ETH, we could make every BuzzwordCoin transaction deposit a small amount of BuzzwordCoin directly to the block’s miner’s address to pay for the contract’s execution. Paying for Gas in a non-ETH asset is sometimes referred to as economic abstraction in the Ethereum community.”
Vitalik Responds
In a lengthy Reddit response, Vitalik Buterin partially agreed with Rubin’s analysis but said Ethereum is “likely not doing “full economic abstraction.””
“In Ethereum as it presently exists, this is absolutely true, and in fact, if Ethereum were not to change, all parts of the author’s argument (except the part about proof of stake, which would not even apply to Ethereum as it is today) would be correct.”
To address economic abstraction, Buterin clarified that developers are considering two proposals that require ETH to be paid at the protocol level. The two proposals – modified fee market and storage maintenance fees – would basically make gas payments in ether mandatory.
Buterin said economic abstraction can still happen at the user level but block proposers would still need to “cough up ETH.”
ETH/USD Price Update
Ethereum declined sharply on Wednesday as part of a wider market pullback. At the time of writing, the ether price was down 9.9% at $259, according to CoinMarketCap. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap briefly traded above $300 over the weekend but was unable to hold that critical level. The panic sale has put ether at a weekly loss of more than 11%.
Disclaimer: The author owns bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. He holds investment positions in the coins, but does not engage in short-term or day-trading.
