Vitalik reiterated Ethereum's mission: to reduce external dependency vulnerabilities through resilience, allowing people to gain sovereign freedom

Ethereum founder Vitalik reiterated the purpose of Ethereum, stating, "The creation of Ethereum is not to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to give people freedom." This is an important and controversial statement from the "Unpermissioned Manifesto" that deserves our re-examination and a better understanding of its meaning. Words like "efficient" and "convenient" imply improving the average situation in an already quite good context. Efficiency refers to allowing the world's best engineers to pour their souls into reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing the yield from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY.

Convenience means enabling people to register in 20 seconds instead of 1 minute with just one click instead of three. These things may be well done. But we must understand that we can never outplay the corporate players in Silicon Valley in this game.

Therefore, the main underlying game that Ethereum must play must be a different game. This game is resilience. Resilience is not about 4.5% APY versus 5.3% APY, but about minimizing your risk of suffering -100% APY. Resilience means that if you become politically unpopular and get banned, or your application developers go bankrupt or disappear, or Cloudflare goes down, or a cyberwar breaks out, your 2000 milliseconds of latency still remains at 2000 milliseconds. Resilience is that anyone, anywhere in the world can access the network and become a top-tier participant.

Resilience is sovereignty, in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies that can be arbitrarily stripped away at any time. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win. Ethereum must first and foremost be a decentralized, permissionless, and resilient block space—then make it rich.