Vitalik: Bitcoin and Ethereum are the Only Projects that Don't Need a Foundation, Giving up Decentralization for TPS is a Mistake

On February 19th, Vitalik, the co-founder of Ethereum, responded to the question "Should today's Ethereum be closer to being a Bitcoin-like entity or a world computer?" in a text-based AMA held on the Tako platform. He said: "I think these two ways of thinking are mutually compatible. If you need to distinguish which blockchains are 'truly decentralized,' you can use a relatively simple test: if their foundation disappeared, could the chain survive? I feel that only Bitcoin and Ethereum can clearly answer this question: of course, they could. Most of Ethereum's development is external. The client teams have independent business models. Many of the vulnerabilities are now outside the foundation. And almost all activities other than Devcon are independent. Reaching this stage is very difficult. Ethereum wasn't like this five years ago. Giving up these advantages in pursuit of transactions per second (TPS) is a big mistake; there will always be new chains coming out with higher TPS. However, decentralization and antifragility are valuable because they are rare in blockchains. These features are beneficial for creating a cryptocurrency with long-term value and also for having a good world computer. But the world computer also needs to address scalability. The meaning of a 'world computer' is not a 'computer that can support every application in the world simultaneously' but rather 'a place where applications in the world can interact with each other.' High-performance computing can be on Layer 2 without any issue. But this role still needs L1 to have sufficient scale. ETH is the application for the world (including finance and others like ENS, etc.) for digital assets to be used among them. ETH also doesn't need every transaction on L1, but it needs enough throughput for anyone who wants to use L1 to occasionally be able to use L1. So these two directions are also compatible here: helping Ethereum achieve the characteristics of a better world computer is also the feature of making ETH a better cryptocurrency."