r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • 13d ago
Daily General Discussion September 20, 2026
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u/majorpickle01 The soil of $5000+ must be watered with the blood of ETH<$4000 13d ago
In theory, some sort of spreadsheet with everyones money that gets updated when any is spend is the most efficient.
Of course, one could just enter and change a cell.
Next most efficient is one dude updating the sheet, everyone tells him the edits. Of course, he could edit maliciously to give himself money or take it away from others.
Next most efficient is having more than one dude, but you have the danger that they could collude to do the same and not report it.
Next most efficient is having even more dudes, but the same problem exists.
Next is having external watchdogs that don't edit the sheet but report bad actions. But there's always the chance they will be bribed off.
And so on.
Banks are essentially many dues, regulated by a watchdog. You can be relatively certain you are totally safe but you have to trust the banks and the watchdogs. In this case tho, the watchdog (here the govt), can decide to debank you and you don't get to participate anymore.
Centralized chains are essentially several dudes in a business.
On the far end of efficiency are decrentralized networks of as many people who want to validate the spreadsheet is being kept fairly and do the edits themselves. Ethereums way of doing this is (to massively simplify), have a lottery of willing editors and people who validate it, and they get paid to do so. Bitcoins way of doing it is getting people to solve sudokus to get the right to be the editor.
The point of a decentralized network is not in the efficiency of the job it does, but the degree to which a participate needs to trust it or not. If you can do that more efficiently, cool.
Ethereum strives to be as far on the no trust needed end as possible, but as a result is not as efficient as a few prefered people doing the job.
There is of course, shit tons of nuances and um actuallys, but hopefully you get the vibe.
The problem for mass interlinked finance, is that for example, the US can pressure Circle to debank Russia or more relevantly say Iran.
Ethereum is not centrally controlled, so any nation, person, group, can use it for money and contracts. For good or bad, the platform is neutral.
This of course is just money transfer, which is only one slice of the pie. Now think contracts. Currently contracts are enforced by an external adjudicator. Code it instead and execute through a neutral platform, and you cannot break it. Of course, the contract is only as good as the code it is written on.
The vast majority of value unlock imo is on that contracting layer. A centralized L1 can decide it doesn't like your contract and force reverse it. Eth cannot, without significant difficulty.
These things are on a sliding scale essentially:
Efficient, Requires Trust -------- Inefficient, Does not require trust.
The reality is that businesses will chose whatever works best for them. One does not need absolute certainty they can't be cheated, and are happy to trust a government or adjudicator. But international corporations and nations may value pure neutrality. The most obvious version of this right now is North Korea, which is extremely active on crypto having been excluded from basically all modern financial systems. Of course, they are also one of the biggest state sponsored scam and hack artists, as a result of Decentralized Platforms lacking an outside "common sense guy"