Practical Pluralism 🌱
An Essay by Auryn Macmillan (CLRFund) & Kevin Owocki (Gitcoin)
The Ethereum network is secured by block producers (currently miners, soon to be replaced by validators). They are the foundation of consensus in the Ethereum network, upon which there are trillions of dollars of assets and untold untapped potential for human coordination.
Having well-designed, secure, and dependable block producers to protect this value is a great strategy to defend the network.
One of the key strategies employed by the Ethereum community to ensure secure and reliable block production is client diversity. This means, more than one implementation of the specification — they can be differentiated by language, architecture, features or which part of the network they specialize in. If a single client were used by 2/3rds (66%) of validators and it experienced a serious bug, there’s a very real risk this could lead to chain instability for users and monetary loss for node operators. By treating client diversity as a public good and fostering an environment where many independent client teams are incentivized to implement the Ethereum protocol in disparate code bases, the Ethereum community bakes in a measure of anti-fragility and resilience against bugs in any one implementation.
Client Diversity is pluralism in practice. (x axis — time, y axis — resource availability)
Pluralism — the understanding that diversity of people, beliefs, opinions, mechanisms, approaches, implementations, etc within a given context generally results in better outcomes than in the absence of such diversity. Nowhere is this more evident than in ecosystems with rich biodiversity; ecosystems where radically different flora and fauna work in a harmoniously competitive act of mutual regulation and perpetuation. This can be seen in how the success of one species feeds and is kept in check by the success of another species, and so on.
Pluralism itself is a primitive for antifragile, resilient, and regenerative systems. As an ecosystem, Ethereum has done a great job fostering diversity in its mining and validating clients. Similarly, we should insist on pluralism across the full stack of web3 technologies and culture. This includes discrete products like wallets, RPC nodes, DAO tooling, public goods funding mechanisms, AMMs, stablecoins, and developer tooling, as well as the intangibles influences like the people, groups, communities, and opinions which participate in and hold sway over our ecosystem.
We are writing this essay because we believe in client diversity. We believe in Pluralism as a primitive. And we want you to join us in extending the ethos of client diversity & pluralism to other layers of the stack. By having pluralism as a core value of each vertical, we make it more likely the space tends towards capture-resistance — not fragility. Participants should be able to choose to use or not use any one of a number of options for any given need.
By having pluralism at the beating heart of each niche, we ensure the space is antifragile. If there is a major bug discovered in one system, the resulting cascading harm can only go so far because there will always be another dApp ready to pick up the slack. For web3 to truly express itself, diversity and pluralism must be core values.
To all those who would seek to build, enshrine, and defend moats in our shared virtual machine, to build systems incapable of composition, incapable of componentization, incapable of being permissionlessly replaced by some alternative:
We say this is a pattern of the past, an antipattern in web3. It’s a pattern enabled by permissioned access to, and control of, data.
This pattern will be made redundant in our version of the internet, made redundant by our shared virtual machine.
The future will be dominated by much more emergent systems; organic compositions of many discrete and interchangeable components, built by disparate people, in combinations never dreamt of by their creators.
It is through this diversity that we build anti-fragility, and a resilience to capture, censorship, and stagnation.
We challenge the protocols at the center of the NFT, DeFi, DAO Tooling ecosystems to adopt practical pluralism as part of their design philosophy & broader Ethos.
Special thank you to TJ Rush, Trent Van Epps, and members of GitcoinDAO, for reviewing drafts of this essay.
