Why Does The World Need Ethscriptions?
The “Why” is more important than the “What”
First, let’s discuss why the world needs Ethereum. Ethereum is a cloud computing platform like AWS; however, while AWS is controlled by Amazon, Ethereum is decentralized and controlled by no one.
The world needs Ethereum not because AWS is inherently bad, but because it would be bad for 100% of cloud computing to be controlled by large corporations.
The problem with Ethereum is that it cannot compete as a general-purpose cloud computing platform because decentralization costs too much — computation is extremely expensive on Ethereum.
This is fine when a significant amount of money is at stake; however, if you’re developing a project without immediate financial returns, experimenting, or simply exploring, it is impractical. For instance, it cost me $150 in gas to register middlemarch.eth in November 2021. This is not a realistic long-term alternative to services like AWS.
How do we fix this? We focus on one less expensive and very useful thing Ethereum can do: provide a “dumb” data store using calldata. (Calldata is data sent along with an Ethereum transaction, typically to a smart contract.)
Historical Ethereum calldata cannot be read or written to by smart contracts, which limits its usefulness. However, Ethereum’s consensus mechanism does ensure that calldata will stick around forever (assuming the protocol is not changed as in the proposed EIP-4444), that we know who wrote the data, and that we know the order in which the data was written. It turns you can do a lot with this information.
How do you convert this “dumb” data into something “smart”? There are two main strategies:
- Maintain Turing Completeness (the ability to execute all possible computer programs) and sacrifice decentralization. This is the L2 approach.
- Sacrifice Turing Completeness and maintain decentralization. This is the Ethscriptions approach.
BOTH of these strategies are 100% necessary, but for different use-cases.
What is an L2?
Think of an L2 as if Amazon created a clone of Ethereum (“AWS-eth”) on which you could run your existing smart contracts. However, instead of a decentralized consensus mechanism, Amazon would be the sole source of truth. But, to increase trust, Amazon would publish the AWS-eth logs to Ethereum as calldata, and provide a “support hotline” you could call if you found an error.
Oh, and AWS-eth uses Amazon Bucks instead of Ether; you can buy Amazon Bucks with Ether and, if Amazon determines you didn’t do anything bad on AWS-eth, you can buy Ether with Amazon Bucks.
I am over-simplifying here to emphasize the point: L2s are completely centralized and that is NOT BAD. I use real life AWS every day! As long as there is competition between L2s and you don’t put your life savings on there, you are almost definitely fine. L2s are extremely important.
What are Ethscriptions?
Unlike L2s, Ethscriptions do not require you to interact with a platform that has a weaker consensus mechanism than Ethereum. However, with Ethscriptions, you can only read and write “dumb” data, meaning any interpretation or intelligence must occur off-chain. Nevertheless, there is no question about the authenticity of the dataset being interpreted.
Why Ethscriptions?
Ethscriptions are essential because they provide an affordable alternative to L2s in cases where decentralization takes precedence over Turing completeness.
While L2s offer incredible benefits and are necessary for many applications, the future of Ethereum should consist of a harmonious blend of centralized and decentralized solutions.
By embracing Ethscriptions, we can work towards achieving this balance and unlocking Ethereum’s full potential!
