On Ethereum: Yin and Yang
— SciEcon Accelerator Debate Series №1
《道德经》第四十二章：道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。萬物負陰而抱陽，沖氣以為和。
The Dao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things. All bear the Yin and embrace the Yang, seeking to be harmonized. — -Dao De Jing, Passage 42
The SciEcon Research Accelerator Program aims to facilitate discussion and innovation in interdisciplinary research. As a crucial element of the program, the debate series brings talented researchers into discussions and debates on a broad range of topics, especially within economics and science. SciEcon debate embodies the philosophical evolvement from thesis to antithesis and finally resides in syntheses. Moreover, to boost empathy which we believe is the cornerstone of every civil society, each scholar must switch sides, debating against and for the same argument. Thus, SciEcon debate is not for competition but to present a unique opportunity, especially for aspiring young scholars, to reason from various perspectives, engage in inspiring conversations, and reach a consensus for collaborating projects.
— -Prof. Luyao Zhang
At the end of this article, we had an interview with Prof. Dr. Yulin Liu. He has a background in quantum computation and monetary theory. Yulin has led economics and governance design at Dfinity, Origyn, Liquity, and Distrikt. As a monetary theorist and crypto economist, he will compare the Internet Computer with Ethereum from three perspectives: Economics, Governance, and Applications.
Figure 1: The debate content: Yin and Yang ©SciEcon 2021
1. Opening Remarks
Tianyu Wu:
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. After Bitcoin, it is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Nowadays, Ethereum hosts DeFi Applications for crowdfunding, financial services, identity management, and gambling, which led to the creation of new products and services that can improve different areas of our lives, such as Non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations. More than that, many academic researchers show their interest and have managed to analyze its privacy, design, safety, stability, implementation issues, opportunities it provides, and the future hurdles we envisage.
Francesco Cavallero:
The debate will look at Ethereum from the three facets of Applications, Economics, and Governance to portrait the fairest representation of the current blockchain scenario. Starting from an application perspective, our debaters will explore how developers can quickly build new interactive applications on Ethereum and the risks associated with its composability feature. Our debate teams will then evaluate multiple economic incentives, such as access to information and transaction costs, that can be pivotal in the widespread adoption of Ethereum. Lastly, our debaters will attempt to reach a consensus about the underlying governance of Ethereum by considering different features like transparency and decentralization.
2. Debating Session 1: Thesis
Perspective 1 (Application)
Pro: Lewis Tian :
Ethereum excels in composability, meaning developers can build applications on the platform and interact with other applications without permission. Moreover, to become a developer for decentralized applications, you don’t have to start from scratch. For example, Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, has already written smart contracts capable of handling tokens waps, upon which are the building blocks that developers can build. The composability provided by Ethereum has brought together a community of developers, fostering creativity and cooperation. Past hackathons have shown us some of the brightest ideas, thanks to composability. Therefore, the composability of Ethereum serves as the foundation of the cross-industry revolutions brought by Ethereum.
Con: Fiona Li:
The composability without permission comes with costs. The first cost is smart contract risk; it can be subject to contract bugs. So in the future, we might have centralized insurance companies hiring professionals to review the code to ensure the security of smart contracts (Ljxie. 2019, 2019). The second cost is limited scalability. Since the system is permissionless, we have more and more people joining the network; Then, the infrastructure part cannot keep up with the complexity of the network. The Ethereum network is processing around 15 transactions per second (TPS) with over thirty dollars gas fee per transaction, which is slow and expensive, making it uneconomical for people to use the platform.
Perspective 2 (Economics)
Pro: Ray Zhu:
Ethereum smart contract has significant advantages in its rule-based mechanism¹, adaptability, and automation that corrects irrational human behaviors. Ethereum contracts can be equipped with information collectors that help trend the market movements in a more accurate way, as suggested by the efficient market theory. The trading strategies built inside facilitates saving investors’ time and costs, avoiding behavioral biases (e.g., herd psychology, overconfidence, anchoring effect, representativeness, etc.), and maximizing profits. On the one hand, its efficiency and intellectuality make short-term arbitrage feasible by transacting financial assets at the most appropriate time. On the other hand, smart contracts objectively and imperturbably make the decision by sticking to the code-law and circumventing human investors’ erratic emotions and irrationality.
Figure 2: 8 Behavioral biases that may hurt your investments
Con: Ziqiao Ao：
Rule-based mechanism restricts the subjective initiative of investors’ behavior and overcomes emotional investment behaviors. Although relying on standard economic models and advanced algorithms, rule-based smart contracts do not necessarily ensure prediction accuracy since they are likely to omit unquantifiable factors such as overall market sentiment. Besides, rule-based mechanisms also possess substantial risks. Once the system has bugs or gets hacked, there is no person in charge of taking responsibility and responding with a remedy, making the consequences often more severe and irreparable than those caused by manual operation.
Perspective 3 (Governance)
Pro: Saad Lahrichi:
Ethereum’s most attractive feature is its off-chain governance system, originally designed with a decentralized ethos, first promulgated by Satoshi Nakamoto. The strength of off-chain governance lies in the ability of Ethereum users to propose protocol updates through EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)². The various stakeholders: miners, developers, and users, express their approval or disapproval of the EIP. When the stakeholders reach a consensus, the protocol changes take place. If not -which is usually the case- the core developers either revoke the EIP or hard fork the protocol and keep features they think are necessary. Hard forks would result in a permanent split into two separate networks that run in parallel (Liu, 2020), (Zoltu, 2021), (ethereum.org). The ability to perform hard forks -an operation possible only under off-chain governance systems- is another strength of Ethereum. For example, to remediate the DAO hack of 2017, the core developers performed a hard fork that essentially returned the stolen funds to their owners (Folk, 2017). Without off-chain governance, this would not have been possible.
Cons: William Zhao
The current framework of EIP lacks transparency and decentralization in decision-making. The technical bar of proposing EIP is high, and the decision-making on whether and why to accept an EIP draft is particularly vague and centralized. The six editors of EIP appointed by the Ethereum Foundation bring the EIPs to the discussion in the All Core Developers Meeting, who then decide the fate of an EIP with no clarified rules. This governance model is called off-chain governance. As Ethereum transforms to its 2.0 version, we will see increasing controversies over the EIPs between users, developers, and miners. The imbalance of voting power can lead to protests from disadvantaged groups. There might also be factors that bias core developers’ decisions, including self-interest, pressure from the governments, bribes, and lobbying.
3. Debating Session 2: Antithesis
Perspective 1 (Application)
Pro: Fiona Li:
Interoperability, the ability of computer systems to exchange information and value, brings us creative cross-industry applications (Engineers, n.d.). For example, Brian Flynn (2019) shares his concept of integrating Stablecoin Dai into the populous Pac-Man game. In the new game, Stablecoin DAI is the reward for an excellent dots collection. However, if the player’s dots collection is smaller than 80 percent, DAI is leftover for the next player. Another cross-industry example is PoolTogether which incorporates lotteries with DeFi. People purchase lottery tickets, and all funds from ticket purchases earn interest through the Defi protocol Compound. Everyone gets their funds back at the end of the lottery, but one winner gets all of the interest earned on the pooled money, so it is essentially a “no-loss” lottery (PoolTogether n.d.). There are other amazing cross-industry applications: The 21OO project, for instance, applies DeFi to social media.
Figure 3: Pac-Man Game
Pac-Man is one of the longest-running, best-selling, and highest-grossing video game franchises in history; it has seen regular releases for over 40 years, has sold nearly 48 million copies across all platforms, and has grossed over US$14.107 billion, most of which has been from the original arcade game.
Con: Lewis Tian:
The recent sensation around Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is a prime example of an Ethereum-enabled cross-industry application. An NFT is a unique cryptocurrency token that can take the form of almost anything digital. The most popular standards for NFTs are ERC-721, the first standard for representing non-fungible digital assets, and ERC-1155, both on the Ethereum blockchain. Unsurprisingly, Ethereum is currently the leading blockchain service for NFT issuance. However, securing NFTs requires enormous mining power by nature of the proof-of-work system. Ethereum mining consumes 26.5 terawatts per year, equivalent to the electricity consumption of Ireland (Somvichian-Clausen 2021). With numerous popular cross-industry applications (e.g., NFTs) built on or facilitated by Ethereum, their cumulative environmental impact is inevitably becoming more concerning than ever.
Perspective 2 (Economics)
Pro: Ziqiao Ao:
Ethereum gains excellent advantages in its permissionless⁴ financial network. Ethereum provides inclusive financial services to anyone in the world with an internet connection by leveraging open-source software. This trustworthy inclusion enables people around the world that are unbanked to join the modern world of Internet commerce. Users could remain anonymous when entering the network. They could make transactions with anyone with a meager transaction fee, incentivizing more investors to participate in network activities. Besides, miners could receive incentives in the form of a mining reward once winning the competition to find a block that satisfies a condition that requires considerable computational effort. All these significantly promote the circulation of the platform currency, and the dynamic balance between supply and demand was realized, thus encouraging sustainable development.
Con: Ray Zhu:
Due to the low entry barrier and anonymity, Ethereum smart contracts’ permissionless characteristics also bring network vulnerabilities and ethical issues. Even worse, a decentralized system always makes it challenging to exert timely human intervention, as happened to the notoriously famous Dao hack in 2016. Stakeholders failed to prevent the hack of 3.6million ether just because they couldn’t get the necessary votes promptly (Siegel 2016). Moreover, the over-opening to the public also burdens the industry. Inclusiveness is good, but it also causes “traffic congestion.” When the user scale transcends a certain critical point, marginal costs become larger than benefits. This side-effect of smart contracts results in an unhealthily expensive gas fee and the accumulation of useless data on the blockchain.
Perspective 3 (Governance)
Pro: William Zhao:
I will now argue why the current off-chain governance model remains to be the most pragmatic one for Ethereum:
- First, technocracy brings the people who know Ethereum the best to decision-making, making the decision process more efficient and professional and the EIP themselves safer and more reliable.
- Moreover, the technocracy⁵ of off-chain governance is better than the plutocracy⁶ of on-chain governance. The on-chain governance relies on the governance tokens to execute voting, so the wealthy people or miners can influence decision-making, which will eventually exacerbate the inequality on blockchain and lead to centralization.
- Finally, off-chain governance will act more efficiently than on-chain governance. A case in point is the DAO Attack that happened in 2016 when the on-chain governance of DAO failed to respond effectively, the the off-chain governance of Ethereum succeeded in deterring the attack.
Con: Saad Lahrichi:
When the DAO hack happened, many people saw restoring people’s money as the supreme goal, but others reasoned that Ethereum is a blockchain, thus immutable. The community should not have the means to overturn that principle, and on-chain governance is likely the better option for various reasons.
- First, the success and popularity of Ethereum make reaching consensus a prolonged process within the community to adopt a protocol change. The on-chain governance system would result in a much shorter turnaround time for decision-making (Liu, 2020).
- What is more, if we think about EIPs as elections, then under the on-chain governance system, votes would not be counted equally, but rather, whoever holds more tokens, holds more voting power. The public knows what the voting rules are, and when consensus is reached, the changes are made automatically, without going through a centralized entity of the core developers. This results in a decentralized governance system, in which the community is the de facto⁷ decision-makers, and hard-forks would hardly happen. (ethhub.io).
The on-chain governance system ensures that the ecosystem benefits all stakeholders, and not just the core developers.
4. Conclusion: Synthesis
Perspective 1 (Application)
Pro: Lewis Tian:
The composability of Ethereum reduces the friction of turning an idea into an actual application for the developers, and by doing so, benefits the general public for enjoying a variety of decentralized applications. This creativity that has been fostering in the community can facilitate more innovations. Applying decentralized applications to industries like game and art, we can better understand and revolutionize the marketplaces, creating new demands and benefiting different audiences by making the applications more accessible and exciting.
Figure 5: Everydays: The First 5000 Days, the NFT art that sold for 69.3 million USD
The major upgrade to Ethereum 2.0⁸ will hopefully resolve the scalability and environmental issues by transitioning from PoW (proof-of-work) to PoS (proof-of-work). To mitigate smart contract risk, proactive defenses by building more robust implementation are essential. Still, it is also crucial to devise damage control strategies on Ethereum, where numerous DApps introduce unavoidable vulnerabilities that can minimize the loss incurred by the risks, to avoid turning a butterfly into a black swan (Chen et al. 2019).
Con: Fiona Li:
The application of Ethereum had several cons, including the risk of smart contracts, scalability issues, and environmental impact. To relieve the tradeoff between permissionless characteristics and the risk brought to smart contracts, we can have centralized insurance companies hiring professionals to review the code to ensure that the smart contract goes well. Furthermore, to enhance scalability and reduce energy waste, the upgrade from PoW to PoS systems may broadly address the problems. In PoS, the mining power is not directly related to how powerful the hardware devices are but by the amount of Ether staked.
Perspective 2 (Economics)
Pro: Ray Zhu:
Smart contracts are excellent for being permissionless and malleable. However, we are far from knowing whether AI investment could perform better than human investors or not. Once the smart contract is in effect, “the code is law,” and the contract will automatically run once it meets the conditions. Hence, delegating to smart contracts in financial investment will sacrifice investors’ coping flexibility and even amplify some systematic bugs or ethical issues. To evaluate the effect of AI investment, we propose the research question, “whether delegation to AI could perform better than human discretion in investment decisions?” We are designing a behavioral experiment to answer this research question. Meanwhile, we will also investigate how personality affects delegation choice.
Figure 6: Where delegation to AI could perform better than human discretion in investment decisions?
Con: Ziqiao Ao:
Regarding the economic side, the main concern for us is the security and the effectiveness of smart contracts. Responding to the call, we could establish a standard to assess smart contracts from the facets of ingrained security and transactions it bolstered. Moreover, it’s also essential to evaluate the contribution of each smart contract to the involvement of the whole Ethereum network. In this endeavor, we could apply social network theories⁹ to recover the dynamics of network features and simulate counterfactual results for comparison. By creating a comprehensive standard, we could mitigate risks and enhance efficiency by predicting transaction anomalies and providing a remedy in advance.
Figure 7: ERC20 token UNI active addresses transaction network on 2021–03–20 ©SciEcon 2021
Perspective 3 (Governance)
Pro: William Zhao:
We have debate off-chain governance, the so-called technocracy, against on-chain governance, the so-called plutocracy. But, of course, the ultimate goal is to achieve the desired outcomes of security, scalability, and efficiency altogether. But, unfortunately, neither of the current governance models is enough to solve the trilemma. Thus, it’s crucial to develop the current models, or maybe an integrated model that can truly achieve desirable outcomes in a decentralized world.
Con: Saad Lahrichi:
On-chain governance seems like a fair, safe, and time-saving option.
- Fair: because it is a decentralized process.
- Safe: because it significantly reduces the possibility of a hard fork.
- Time-saving: because it drastically reduces turnaround times.
However, on-chain governance might fail to reach consensus promptly when stakeholders largely disagree. “To be or not to be, it is a question.”
Let me ask you, the readers:
Do we want to keep Ethereum as it has been and trust developers to have the last word in decision-markings? Or, do we want to bring a fundamental change by adopting on-chain governance that gives power back to all stakeholders on the blockchain through decentralized, rule-based, and automated voting mechanisms?
Interview
For Prof. Yulin Liu:
Can you briefly highlight how Internet Computer improves upon Ethereum in facets of Applications, Economics and Governance?
Script:
Prof. Zhang:
Our debaters have been discussing the pros and cons, Yin and Yang of the Ethereum blockchain from the three perspectives of Economics, Governance, and Applications. However, we can see that there are so many we need to improve upon Ethereum blockchain. So, we know you have been working in the crypto space for several years and led economics and on-chain governance research at Dfinity. So, I’m wondering whether you could share what are the exciting possibilities that the Internet Computer can bring to the blockchain industry. So, the first question is, from the perspective of Governance, how do you think the Internet Computer performs better than the Ethereum blockchain.
Prof. Liu:
Well, that’s a great question. You know, first for Ethereum, it doesn’t have an on-chain governance system yet. So now it’s an off-chain governance system. And decisions are made by a small group of people, mostly the technical developers. The Internet Computer built by DFINITY Foundation is different in two perspectives. First, it has an on-chain governance system, a network nervous system, where everyone, or every token holder could submit proposals, and then everyone can vote. So that’s the first difference. The Internet Computer has an on-chain governance. And Ethereum has an off-chain governance system. But I think Ethereum is transitioning into a proof of stake and on-chain governance system eventually, in the next few years.
Prof. Zhang:
Yeah, sounds great. However, in the previous discussion, our debaters have raised some problems or issues of the on-chain governance as well. For example, sometimes the absolute democracy, caused by the on-chain governance could include many people who are not experts to vote on the issue that they do not have expertise with. And in the end, it only leads to a worse outcome or cost delays when we should make very quick and prompt important decisions, where the experts have more expertise in. So how does the Internet Computer solve this problem?
Prof. Liu:
That actually comes to my second point of the major difference between the governance system of DFINITY and the governance system of Ethereum. So, of course, voting is costly. Voters need to spend time reading and doing research on these proposals that requires effort and also expertise. Actually, most token holders don’t care about the voting power. They care more about the economic incentives than the voting power. On the Internet Computer, we have the so-called liquid democracy to solve this problem. The liquid democracy means voters could delegate their votes to experts, so they will follow automatically the vote of these experts. It is called liquid democracy, because these voters could withdraw the delegation at any time if they are not happy with the voting results of these experts. This is our argument of another advantage of the Internet Computer.
Prof. Zhang:
Yeah, it looks promising. The second question is, from the perspective of Economics, how do you think the Internet Computer improves upon Ethereum blockchain?
Prof. Liu:
I think there are several major differences when we talk about token economics of DFINITY and Ethereum. The first one is who is going to pay the transaction fees. On Ethereum, it’s users who pay the transaction fee. As a user, whenever you send a transaction, no matter if it’s a transfer of your tokens from one address to another address, or it’s a call for some smart contracts, it costs you something. This is the gas fee. This is actually quite a pain for users: for every operation you do on Ethereum, you need to pay money. And this is different from the traditional internet space. Nowadays, when you use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, you open your account, you post something, you retweet, you share, you upload photos, this is free. This is what users get used to nowadays.
For Ethereum, I would say that’s the point that prevents Ethereum from broader adoption. And on the Internet Computer, we are different in the sense that it’s not users paying, but the canisters paying. Canisters on the Internet Computer are similar to the smart contracts on Ethereum. Here, canisters are preloaded with gas tokens called CYCLE. As a developer of the canister, you need to preload the canister with a certain amount of CYCLE tokens. And users could use your canister or your smart contract frictionlessly without paying any fee. So, that’s one major difference. I would say that’s one major advantage of the canisters-pay model.
Prof. Zhang:
Yeah, it sounds like the Internet Computer makes the economy much more inclusive by lowering the market barriers, especially since we know that for each individual user, there might be many people who are not able to have a very large number of transactions. So if each time they need to pay the fees for the transaction that would really increase market friction. However, if this burden is transferred to the provider or supplier side, it could be much easier because they have more sources to get funding and solve this problem. Sounds great. So what else?
Prof. Liu:
Right. I would say there are of course many economic advantages. The second thing that comes to my mind is the dual token system. On Ethereum, it has only one token, one native token. It’s ETH. And users for every operation they conduct on Ethereum network, they need to pay gas. And the gas price is measured in ETH. And ETH price is very volatile, which makes the transaction fee very volatile. Today, if I transfer some tokens to you, it will cost me $1. And tomorrow it would cost me $10. This is not friendly for people doing business on Ethereum.
On the Internet Computer, we solve this problem by creating a dual token system. We have our native token called ICP token. This is like ETH. And then we have the second token called CYCLE. Anyone could burn the ICP token into our stable coin, CYCLE. And CYCLE is pegged to SDR, a special drawing rights at IMF International Monetary Funds. This consists of a basket of sovereign currencies. So, this is relatively stable, and CYCLE is relatively stable. All the gas fees are measured in CYCLEs. And since CYCLE is a stable coin, you can precisely predict how much it costs for you to do any operation: to create a smart contract, to transfer tokens, or to use any applications deployed on the Internet Computer. To wrap up, I would say the two major advantages are: first, it’s canisters-pay model, not users pay; Secondly, it has a dual token system.
Prof. Zhang:
Yeah, those are very cool features. Last but not the least, I think what many people would care the most about is how the Internet Computer would bring true sense to the new user experiences when they are using all kinds of applications in daily life. How do you think?
Prof. Liu:
Yeah, I would say, let’s look at this from the macro perspective. The first decentralized blockchain project is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a very simple system. Basically, you can only do transfers: you send tokens from address A to address B. And then a few years later, in 2015, Ethereum was developed. Ethereum is a smart contract platform, but it is too slow. It has problems with scalability, throughput and latency. That’s very bad for the user’s experience. That’s why, now as you see, on Ethereum there are mostly DeFi projects. You can hardly deploy a decentralized LinkedIn, a decentralized TikTok, or a decentralized Facebook on Ethereum, because it’s too slow and costly. Now, with the Internet Computer developed by DFINITY, everything is possible: you can deploy a decentralized LinkedIn, a decentralized Facebook, a decentralized Twitter that are not possible on Ethereum, at a very low price.
Prof. Zhang:
Wow, that’s really exciting! So really thank you for the time today. And I guess everyone is now getting very excited that one day they could use the applications of all the new features on the Internet Computer.
About the Debaters
Ziliang (Lewis) Tian (headshot left), Fiona (Jiayi) Li (headshot right)
Ziliang (Lewis) Tian is a junior at Duke Kunshan University. He is currently pursuing a B.S. in Data Science. With a strong interest in academic research, he has applied machine learning and other data science techniques to several interdisciplinary research projects.
Fiona (Jiayi) Li is a junior student at DKU. She majors in Data Science and is keen on applying theories & techniques she has learned in class to solve practical business problems. With a strong interest in this field, she has contributed to multiple research projects and gained several periods of internship experience as a data analyst or an industry researcher.
Ziqiao (Bonnie) Ao (headshot left), Jiasheng (Ray) Zhu (headshot right)
Ziqiao (Bonnie) Ao is a junior at Duke Kunshan University. She is currently pursuing a B.S. in Data Science. With a strong interest in FinTech and economics, she contributed to the Virtual Behavioral Lab as a founding member and has applied multiple data science techniques to several interdisciplinary research projects.
Jiasheng (Ray) Zhu is a junior at Duke Kunshan University. He is currently pursuing a B.S. in Economics. With a strong interest in behavioral economics and finance, he contributed to the Virtual Behavioral Lab as a founding member. Moreover, with the instruction of Prof. Luyao Zhang, he designed and implemented several experiments to answer fundamental economic questions by using interdisciplinary skills.
Saad Lahrichi (headshot left), William (Yinhong) Zhao (headshot right)
Saad Lahrichi is a sophomore student at Duke Kunshan University. He is currently pursuing a B.S in Data Science and has interests in the interdisciplinary applications of machine learning in FinTech, global health, and neuroscience.
William (Yinhong) Zhao is a sophomore at Duke University. He is currently pursuing a B.S. in Economics, with a concentration in financial economics, and a B.S. in Mathematics. With a strong interest in academic research, he has contributed to multiple research projects at Duke and DKU.
HOSTS
Tianyu Wu (headshot left), Francesco Cavallero (headshot right)
Tianyu Wu is currently a sophomore student, pursuing a B.S. in Applied Mathematics at Duke Kunshan University. With strong enthusiasm and interest in Economics and Computer Science, he is devoted to academic research in FinTech investment.
Francesco Cavallero is a junior at DKU majoring in Political Economy/Economics. He is currently at Duke where he is pursuing a B.S. in Economics with a Finance concentration. This past summer he interned in the Italian Banking Association’s Fintech division in Rome. He spent his previous summer in Shanghai at Jesa Investment Management as an M&A analyst. In his free time, you can find him sailing around the Mediterranean Sea.
References
Calma, Justine. 2021. “The Climate Controversy Swirling around NFTs.” The Verge. March 15, 2021.
[1] Rule-based mechanism requires subjects to pursue the same course of action in all circumstances.
[2] Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) describe standards for the Ethereum platform, including core protocol specifications, client APIs, and contract standards.
[3] Proof-of-Work is a consensus mechanism that verifies transactors with computational efforts.
[4] Permissionless blockchains, also known as public blockchains, are blockchains that require no permission to join and interact with.
[5] A technocracy is a model of governance wherein decision-makers are chosen for office based on their technical expertise and background, where the rulers are required to acquire their relevant skills and proven performance, as opposed to whether or not they fit the majority interests of a popular vote.
[6] Plutocracy is a government controlled exclusively by the wealthy, either directly or indirectly.
[7] De facto describes practices that exist in reality, even though they are not officially recognized by laws.
[8] Ethereum 2.0 will be a major change for Ethereum to solve some of its current issues.
[9] Social network theory views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual players within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the players.
Acknowledgments:
Design: Yixuan Li
Executive Editor: Xinyu Tian
Scenarist: Prof. Luyao Zhang
Advisors and Chief Editors: Prof. Luyao Zhang, Prof. Yulin Liu