Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once elaborated on this thinking and suggestion in his blog post Making Ethereum alignment legible: Regarding the issue of decentralization and security, we must ensure that we minimize dependence on centralized infrastructure and minimize review loopholes. To this end, we can test and evaluate the following methods: "Walk Away Test" and "Internal Attack Test".
Among them, "Internal Attack Test" refers to launching an attack on the system autonomously to observe how much harm it will cause, so as to discover loopholes; while "Walk Away Test" is a newer thinking tool used to check the degree of dependence of projects and network centralization. It can become a key test for evaluating decentralized projects, and can also be improved and upgraded to become a risk rating tool.
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Making Ethereum alignment legible, please refer to the original text:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/09/28/alignment.html
What is the "leave test"?
If your team and server disappeared tomorrow, would your application still work?
This is the core testing idea of the "leave test" - a thinking tool that can be used to evaluate whether a Web3 project, platform or protocol has real independent operation capabilities and sustainable development value.
The "leave test" is closely related to the technical philosophy of blockchain decentralization and autonomy. The thinking directions derived from this test include:
Project development:
If the development team is disbanded, can the project still operate independently?
Is there an active community that can take over the project after the team leaves?
Is the project's code open source and can it attract developers to continue to improve it?
Is there a decentralized verification node to protect the network, or enough community support to maintain and develop?
Economic model:
Does the project have a sustainable economic model?
Does the project have sustainable application scenarios?
Does the asset appreciation on the project actually rely on speculative manipulation or centralized control?
Community governance:
Do all parties involved in the project have a way to participate in decision-making fairly?
Can the project start the decision-making mechanism and solve problems without clarifying the core managers?
Does the project have to rely on a few core members to govern, or does it have a more widely distributed collective governance foundation?
Why is "Leaving the Test" important?
If a project is too dependent on the founding team or certain key personnel to operate; if a network must rely on a fixed server to process data, then it is still centralized in nature, and the long-term viability, value, and even anti-censorship and anti-risk capabilities of the project or network may be questioned.
The importance of "leaving the test" lies in the fact that through this thinking tool, the actual situation of the project or network's dependence on centralized infrastructure can be excavated, so that the project or network can be effectively improved. The technical philosophy it relies on is a firm "decentralization".
In 2017, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in an early blog post on the concept of decentralization:
"Decentralization" is one of the most common words in the field of cryptoeconomics, and is often used as a direct basis to measure whether a network is a blockchain network. However, the actual meaning of this word often causes a lot of confusion and confusion.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out: When people discuss a certain decentralization issue, they are actually discussing three independent aspects:
Is it centralized or decentralized in terms of architecture?
For example, how many computers does this system consist of? How many computers can this system tolerate crashing at any time and still continue to run?
Is it politically centralized or decentralized?
For example, how many individuals and organizations can ultimately control the computers that make up this system?
Is it logically centralized or decentralized?
For example, are the system's interfaces and database structures a single entity? Or are they an unstructured group? If the users and providers of the system are split into two, can they still operate as completely independent units?
As for the role and significance of "decentralization", Vitalik Buterin also gave a clear explanation in his blog post in 2018:
Fault-tolerant:Decentralized systems are less likely to fail unexpectedly because they rely on many independent components. In theory, the probability of independent components failing at the same time is relatively low.
Anti-attack:Decentralized systems make it more expensive to be attacked, damaged, and manipulated because they lack sensitive central points. The cost and difficulty of attacking a system with a clear central point is significantly lower than that of a decentralized system.
Preventing Collusion: If participants in a decentralized system want to sacrifice the interests of other participants and conspire to profit for themselves, they will pay a higher price than participants in a centralized system.
Core Value: A Key Test for Evaluating Decentralized Projects
If we look at the logic of "leaving the test", Bitcoin can be considered to have passed this test: the public does not know where Satoshi Nakamoto is, but Bitcoin can continue to develop based on a decentralized network and global developers.
In Ethereum, founder Vitalik Buterin once mentioned in a forum in 2022: At present, almost all Rollups are not mature, and most of them use auxiliary means called Training Wheels to ensure operation. However, the auxiliary means of Training Wheels reflect the Rollup project's reliance on "human intervention" from another perspective. The lower the risk of the Layer2 network that does not rely on Training Wheels, the higher the risk of the Layer2 network that relies more on Training Wheels.
For this reason, Vitalik Buterin and others classified the Rollup project according to its degree of reliance on Training Wheels: Stage 0 (complete reliance), Stage 1 (partial reliance), and Stage 2 (complete abandonment). Subsequently, the L2beat website revised this classification scheme by soliciting opinions from the community, and upgraded it to the "Layer2 Risk Rating Index" in June 2024 to rate the risks of different Layer2 projects.
What are Training Wheels?
Training Wheels (common translation: training wheels) are certain restrictive mechanisms or measures added to ensure security and stability in the early stages of the implementation of Rollup technology.
Rollup protocols that need to implement Training Wheels usually have not yet achieved trustlessness or trust minimization. The main reasons may include that the code is too complex or has not yet been audited, the potential attack surface of the contract is large; the protocol has just been launched and user trust has not yet been established.
In this regard, Vitalik Buterin pointed out that his ideal goal is to see more entities like L2beat appear to be able to track the actual situation of various projects in meeting established standards or other standards proposed by the community. The competition between projects will no longer be "whether you have the right friends", but to "stay consistent" as much as possible according to clear and easy-to-understand standards.
From a larger perspective, "Leaving the Test" can actually be improved and upgraded to become a risk rating tool, to measure the actual situation of the decentralized essence and development sustainability of Web3 wallets, or various decentralized use cases such as games and DeFi.
As a common political philosophy theory: To solve the problem of "who supervises whom", the best way is to separate powers, not to concentrate them. Project "alliances" lead to the concentration of power, while the realization of separation of powers depends on institutions and culture - in the blockchain world, this institution and culture represents the "consensus standard".
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