Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the crypto industry may be overcomplicating what blockchains are actually for.
In a post on
Instead of starting with Ethereum and trying to find places to use it, he suggested that developers should first ask themselves what kind of tools are needed to build secure, open, and censorship-resistant technology.
From that perspective, Ethereum’s most important function may be surprisingly simple: acting as what cryptographers call a “public bulletin board.”
Many secure digital systems need a place where information can be published and publicly verified. That could include things like secure voting systems, lists of revoked digital certificates, or records used in cryptographic protocols. These systems don’t necessarily need smart contracts or complicated financial transactions, but rather a shared place where data can be stored and accessed reliably.
Ethereum can serve that role because it provides a decentralized network where anyone can publish data and anyone can read it.
Buterin said that recent Ethereum updates are making this type of use even more practical. An upgrade, known as PeerDAS, increases the amount of data the network can store and share, with plans to expand the capacity much further in the future.
While these systems do not always require payments, some type of financial cost is often necessary to prevent spam on open networks. That’s where Ethereum’s native token, ether (ETH), comes into play.
Payments can help protect decentralized services from abuse. Buterin gives the example that if a messaging app allowed anyone to create unlimited accounts for free, attackers could flood the system with spam. Requiring small payments in ETH can make that type of attack more expensive while keeping the system open to anyone.
Buterin also noted that Ethereum can help power new types of payment systems. Technologies such as zero-knowledge payment channels could allow people to pay small amounts for services while keeping transactions private.
Smart contracts also continue to play an important role, particularly in maintaining security deposits or enabling automated agreements between users.
Taken together, Buterin described Ethereum as a kind of “global shared memory,” an infrastructure that allows many different applications to store data, exchange value, and coordinate with each other.
“Ethereum has great value, which can be seen from first principles if you step back and view it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory,” he wrote.
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