Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once elaborated on such thoughts in his blog post Making Ethereum alignment legible: regarding the issues of decentralization and security, it is essential to minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure and minimize censorship loopholes. To achieve this, we can assess through methods like the 'Walk Away Test' and 'internal attack testing'.
Among them, 'internal attack testing' refers to autonomously attacking the system to observe the potential harm caused, thereby discovering vulnerabilities; while 'Walk Away Test' is a newer cognitive tool used to check the degree of centralization dependency of a project or network, 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 idea of the 'Walk Away Test' — it is a cognitive tool used to assess whether a Web3 project, platform, or protocol has genuine independent operational capability and sustainable development value.
'Walk Away Test' is closely related to the technical philosophical concepts of decentralization and autonomy in blockchain. The thinking directions that can be derived from 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 able to attract developers to continue improving it?
Are there decentralized verification 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 have sustainable application scenarios?
Does the appreciation of assets on the project fundamentally rely on speculative manipulation or centralized control?
Community governance aspect:
Do the participants of the project have a fair way to participate in decision-making?
Can the project initiate decision-making mechanisms and resolve issues without clearly defined core managers?
Does the project need to rely on a few core members for governance, or does it have a broader foundation for collective decision-making?
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. The long-term viability, value, and even resistance to censorship and risks of the project or network may be called into question.
The importance of the 'Walk Away Test' lies in its ability to uncover the actual situation of a project or network's dependency on centralized infrastructure through this cognitive tool, allowing for effective improvements based on the firm philosophical idea of '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 cryptoeconomics and is often used as a direct basis to determine whether a network is a blockchain network. However, the actual meaning of this term often leads to much confusion.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out: when people discuss a decentralized issue, they are actually discussing these three independent aspects:
Is the architecture centralized or decentralized?
For example, how many computers make up this system? How many computers can fail at any one time while the system continues to operate?
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, is the system's interface and database structure a single whole? Or a non-structured collective? If we split the users and providers of the system, can they still operate as completely independent units?
And what is the significance of emphasizing 'decentralization'? Vitalik Buterin provided a clear explanation of this in his 2018 blog post:
Has fault tolerance: decentralized systems have a lower probability of unexpected failure because they rely on many independent components. Theoretically, the probability of independent components failing simultaneously is relatively low.
Has attack resistance: decentralized systems make the cost of being attacked and manipulated higher because they lack sensitive focal points. The cost and difficulty of attacking systems with clear focal points are significantly lower than those of decentralized systems.
Prevention of collusion: if participants in a decentralized system want to sacrifice the interests of others to conspire for their own gain, they have to pay a higher price than participants in a centralized system.
Core value: key test for evaluating decentralized projects
If viewed from the logic 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 relying on a decentralized network and global developers.
In Ethereum, founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned in a forum in 2022 that almost all Rollups are not mature and mostly use auxiliary means known as Training Wheels to ensure operation. However, the reliance on Training Wheels reflects the Rollup project's dependence on 'human intervention'; the less a Layer2 network relies on Training Wheels, the lower its risk; conversely, the more it relies on Training Wheels, the higher the risk.
To this end, Vitalik Buterin and others categorized the dependency of Rollup projects on Training Wheels into stages: Stage 0 (fully dependent), Stage 1 (partially dependent), Stage 2 (fully abandoned). Subsequently, the L2beat website revised this classification scheme through community feedback and upgraded it in June 2024 to the 'Layer2 Risk Rating Index' to rate the risk of different Layer2 projects.
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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.
Training Wheels are typically implemented in Rollup protocols that have not yet achieved trustlessness or minimal trust, primarily due to reasons like overly complex code or lack of security audits, and significant attack surfaces of contracts; the protocol is newly launched, and user trust has not yet been established.
In this regard, Vitalik Buterin pointed out: his ideal goal is to see more entities like L2beat emerge to track the real situations of various projects in meeting established standards or other standards proposed by the community. Competition among projects will no longer be about 'whether you have the right friends', but rather about 'staying aligned' according to clear, understandable standards.
From a broader perspective, the 'Walk Away Test' can also be refined and upgraded into a risk rating tool to measure the substance of decentralization and the actual sustainability of various decentralized applications, such as Web3 wallets, games, DeFi, etc.
As a common political philosophy theory suggests: to solve the 'who supervises whom' issue, the best approach is the separation of powers rather than power concentration. The project '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'.
