Author: Coach Liu

In today's 3.28 Teaching Chain internal reference "Whale Turns Accumulation", Teaching Chain mentioned that the essence of Ethereum PoS to PoW is to delete the interest group of miners, thereby reducing the parties that checks and balances in the game, weakening the decentralization, and thus reducing the overall degree of decentralization.

Cai Lian closed his book and thoughts, and he couldn't help but fall into deep thinking about power and interests...

Cai Lian thought of two sentences:

Power without interests is incomplete.

The interests without power are not long-lasting.

The understanding of the first sentence is:

Give power to one or a group of people, but does not give corresponding benefits. Then there will be two consequences: either they will use their power to gain profits, or they will voluntarily give up their power.

On the contrary, if one person or a group of people enjoys the benefits but does not possess matching power, there will be two consequences: either they will use the acquired benefits to gain power through various means such as bribery or transactions, or their interests will gradually be seized and occupied by others who hold power.

It can even be said that

Power without interest is not real power. Just like you are promoted to a management position without a salary increase or stocks, it only means that this leadership position is in name but not real.

The interests without power are not real interests either. Just like if you hold the platform coins issued by a certain platform, but you cannot enjoy the voting rights protected by law like shareholders, then the income from holding the platform coins is just for the sake of human beings, and the bet on the trader's inner kindness and sharing of interests.

It can be seen from this that power and interests are inseparable from two sides of the coin. Interests are the economic basis of power. Power is the superstructure of interests.

After the end, it is the economic foundation that determines the superstructure. It is the influence of interests on power. What power exerts reactionary force on interests.

OK. Now back to decentralization.

In the view of the Teaching Chain, the essence of decentralization is the decentralization of power, that is, the decentralization of power. As for technological implementation, it is a means and a material basis.

What is power?

Power is the consent of others to obey and cooperate.

The power that many people understand is ensured by violent institutions to be widely obedient and cooperative. But in fact, this understanding is very flawed.

On the one hand, violence does not ensure the realization of power. For those who are ready to die, power that depends on violence fails and dies.

On the other hand, in addition to violence, there are many ways and means to realize power, such as relying on influence, personal charm, moving with emotion, understanding with reason, buying with money, and even deceiving and deceiving, you can achieve obedience and cooperation from others, and then power is realized.

On the contrary, if we allow others to disobey or cooperate, then we will eliminate our own power, grant the other party a certain amount of power, and realize the dispersion of power.

What is it to allow others to disobey or cooperate? That's right. It is to give freedom to others.

So, from a strict logic, the realization of power must be at the cost of reducing the freedom of others; and the realization of freedom must be based on the dispersion of power.

Decentralization is the road to freedom. So this is why BlackRock CEO once said that the value of BTC is the value of human freedom.

Give people freedom, that is, liberation of people.

Liberation requires freedom. Freedom requires decentralization. Decentralization requires decentralization and checks and balances. To disperse power, you need to disperse your interests.

BTC invented by Satoshi Nakamoto created a brand new power group - PoW Miners.

Although they are all called "mining", PoW miners who use hardware computing power and a large amount of power for physical mining are essentially different from PoS nodes that pledge tokens for financial interest generation.

The essential difference is that the means of production of PoW miners, that is, the productive capital he has, is the mining machine hardware, rather than the means of production of PoS nodes, which are mainly monetary capital. Although PoS nodes also need to run machines to facilitate block accounting, this is only a means of exercising accounting power, not as its main means of production. His main means of production is monetary capital, which is the tokens he pledged. His interests come from the interest generation of token stakes, not the operation of machine nodes.

From this, take another step forward and enter the territory of DeFi staking mining. Here, mining has become a mask. All physical computing power and electricity have been cancelled. Just deposit the token and you can get interest.

Production in BTC has finally become a pure financial cycle game.

PoW miners' means of production are machine computing power. The means of production of BTC hoarders is monetary capital. The capital they have in their hands, the mechanism of interest, and the types of power are different. So the power was dispersed. Two types of power play and balance each other.

From PoS to DeFi pledge, means of production have basically become monetary capital. This makes the so-called new miners, which are not the same species as BTC's PoW miners, but are highly convergent with token hoarders, especially large investors and giant whales. Their means of production are monetary capital. So the power dispersed in BTC was once again concentrated and concentrated in the hands of monetary capital. Big owners and giant whales are the concrete images of monetary capital. Recentralized power loses the game and checks and balances that exist in BTC. The lack of checks and balances power is like a giant beast, monopolizing and kidnapping the development and future of the project.

In Jiaolian's view, the success of BTC is the success of decentralization. The reason why BTC has succeeded in decentralization is because Satoshi Nakamoto created a brand new interest and power group that had never been seen in history, namely PoW Miners.

The question further thinking is, why has none of the other so-called blockchain systems that have deleted PoW miners at the first level achieved robust success?

Jiulian thinks that the reason may be this. That is, after removing the PoW miners, this part of the power and interests will be seized by other roles, and the power of the entire system will be imbalanced. A certain role will gain an overwhelming advantage, thereby monopolizing the entire system, causing the system to lose effective game and checks and balances, thus allowing decentralization to die in name only and eventually lead to corruption and decline.

Human nature determines that if external challenges, games, checks and balances are lost, the monopoly system will inevitably lead to corruption. As Lord Acton said: Power leads to corruption, absolute power leads to absolute corruption.

In BTC systems, it is generally believed that PoW miners are one pole, coin hoarders are one pole, and the third pole is the BTC open source code maintainer. This understanding is actually inconclusive. As a power pole, open source code maintainers have very vague interests and power basis. The BTC system does not directly reward code developers. They rely purely on volunteer service, driven by vision and idealism intrinsically. The BTC system does not directly give developers explicit power. Unlike PoW miners who have the right to send block rewards to themselves, while coin hoarders use their private keys to firmly control their BTC, their exercise of power is direct, explicit and clear. Developers can only gain community recognition by their own professionalism and influence, otherwise anyone has the right to refuse to use the code they developed.

If PoW miners are removed for various possible reasons such as low carbon or cost thresholds, and to achieve decentralized decentralization, new roles and mechanisms are needed to fill this blank space in power and interests, and they cannot be lost to other roles that need to be checked and balanced, thus causing the system's power imbalance and interests to collapse to centralization.