Written by: imToken
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once elaborated on this thinking suggestion in his blog post 'Making Ethereum alignment legible': Regarding decentralization and security issues, it is essential to minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure and reduce censorship loopholes as much as possible. For this, the testing and evaluation methods we can use include: 'Walk Away Test' and 'Internal Attack Test'.
Among them, the 'Internal Attack Test' refers to autonomously attacking the system to observe how much harm it can cause, thereby discovering vulnerabilities; while the 'Walk Away Test' is a newer thinking tool used to check the degree of centralization dependence of projects and networks, which can become a key test for evaluating decentralized projects and can also be refined and upgraded into a risk rating tool.
Making Ethereum alignment legible, please refer to the original text:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/09/28/alignment.html
What is the 'Walk Away Test'?
If your team and servers disappeared tomorrow, would your application still work?
This is the core testing idea of the 'Walk Away Test' — a thinking tool that can be used to assess whether a Web3 project, platform, or protocol possesses true operational independence and sustainable development value.
The 'Walk Away Test' is closely related to the technical philosophy of decentralization and autonomy in blockchain. The derivative thinking directions of this test include:
Project Development Aspect:
If the development team disbands, 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 capable of attracting developers to continue improvements?
Are there decentralized validating nodes protecting the network, or sufficient community support to maintain development?
Economic Model Aspect:
Does the project have a sustainable operational economic model?
Does the project possess sustainable application scenarios?
Does the appreciation of assets on the project fundamentally rely on speculative manipulation or centralized control?
Community Governance Aspect:
Do participants from all sides of the project have fair avenues to participate in decision-making?
Can the project initiate decision-making mechanisms and solve problems without clearly identifying core managers?
Does the project have to rely on a few core members for governance, or does it have a broader base for collective governance?
Why is the 'Walk Away Test' important?
If a project relies too much 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 essentially still centralized, and the long-term viability, value, and even censorship resistance and risk resistance of that project or network may be questioned.
The importance of the 'Walk Away Test' lies in its ability to uncover the actual dependency of projects or networks on centralized infrastructure through this thinking tool, allowing projects or networks to effectively improve, relying on the technical philosophical thought of firm 'decentralization'.
In 2017, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in an early blog post discussing the concept of decentralization:
'Decentralization' is one of the most common terms in the field of crypto-economics and is often used as a direct basis to measure whether a network is a blockchain network. However, the actual meaning of this term often leads to much confusion and misunderstanding.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out: When people discuss a decentralized issue, they are actually discussing three independent aspects:
Is it centralized or decentralized architecturally?
For example, how many computers make up this system? How many computers can fail at any given time, and the system can still continue to operate?
Is it centralized or decentralized politically?
For instance, how many individuals and organizations can ultimately control the computers that make up this system?
Is it centralized or decentralized logically?
For example, is the system's interface and database structure a single whole? Or a non-structured group? If we separate the users of the system from the providers, can they still operate as completely independent units?
As for the significance and role of emphasizing 'decentralization', Vitalik Buterin also provided a clear explanation in his 2018 blog post:
Having fault tolerance: Decentralized systems have a lower probability of unexpected failures because they rely on many independent components. Theoretically, the probability of independent components failing simultaneously is relatively low.
Having resistance to attacks: Decentralized systems make the cost of being attacked, destroyed and manipulated higher because they lack a sensitive central point. The cost and difficulty of launching an attack on 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 for their own profit, they have to pay a higher price than participants in a centralized system.
Core Value: Key Tests for Evaluating Decentralized Projects
From the perspective of the 'Walk Away 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 mentioned in a forum in 2022: Almost all Rollups are not mature yet, and most adopt an auxiliary means called Training Wheels to ensure operation. However, the reliance on Training Wheels reflects the Rollup projects' dependence on 'human intervention'; the less a Layer2 network relies on Training Wheels, the lower its risk; the more it relies on Training Wheels, the higher its risk.
To this end, Vitalik Buterin and others classified the dependence on Training Wheels based on Rollup projects: Stage 0 (fully dependent), Stage 1 (partially dependent), Stage 2 (completely abandoned). Subsequently, the L2beat website revised this classification scheme through community feedback 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 (commonly translated as auxiliary wheels) are certain restrictive mechanisms or measures added in the early implementation of Rollup technology to ensure safety and stability.
Protocols that require the implementation of Training Wheels typically have yet to achieve trustlessness or minimal trust, mainly due to reasons such as overly complex code or not having undergone security audits, and large potential attack surfaces of contracts; the protocol is newly launched, and user trust has not yet been established, etc.
In this regard, Vitalik Buterin pointed out: His ideal goal is to see more entities like L2beat emerge, capable of tracking various projects' real situations in meeting established standards or other standards proposed by the community. Competition between projects will no longer be about 'whether they have the right friends', but rather about 'staying consistent' as much as possible according to clear and understandable standards.
From a broader perspective, the 'Walk Away Test' can also be refined and upgraded into a risk rating tool used to assess the actual decentralization essence and sustainable development conditions of Web3 wallets, or various decentralized use cases such as games and DeFi.
As a common political philosophy theory suggests: To solve the problem of 'who supervises whom', the best approach is the separation of powers, rather than the concentration of power. The project's 'alliance' leads to power concentration, while the realization of power separation relies on systems and culture — in the blockchain world, this system and culture represent the 'standards of consensus'.
