Article source: imToken
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once articulated such a thought suggestion in his blog post 'Making Ethereum alignment legible': Regarding issues of decentralization and security, it is crucial to minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure and minimize vulnerabilities to censorship. For this purpose, we can test and evaluate methods such as: 'Walk Away Test' and 'Internal Attack Test'.
Among them, 'Internal Attack Test' refers to autonomously attacking the system to observe the extent of harm caused, thereby discovering vulnerabilities; while 'Walk Away Test' is a newer mental tool used to check the degree of dependency on centralization of projects and networks, which can serve as a key test for assessing decentralized projects and can be refined and upgraded into a risk rating tool.
For the original text of 'Making Ethereum alignment legible', please refer to:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/09/28/alignment.html
What is 'Walk Away Test'?
If your team and servers disappeared tomorrow, would your application still work?
This is the core testing thought of 'Walk Away' — it is a mental tool used to evaluate whether Web3 projects, platforms, or protocols have true autonomous operation capabilities and sustainable development value.
'Walk Away' is closely related to the technical philosophical concepts of blockchain decentralization and autonomy, and the directions of thought that can be derived from this test include:
Project development aspects:
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?
Are there decentralized validating nodes protecting the network, or sufficient community support to maintain development?
Economic model aspects:
Does the project have a sustainable economic model for operation?
Does the project possess sustainable application scenarios?
Does the asset appreciation on the project essentially rely on speculative manipulation or centralized control?
Community governance aspects:
Do participants in the project have a fair way to participate in decision-making?
Can the project initiate decision-making mechanisms and solve problems without a clear core manager?
Does the project have to rely on a few core members for governance, or does it have a broader basis for collective decision-making?
Why is 'Walk Away Test' important?
If a project relies too heavily on the founding team or certain key personnel to operate, or if a network must depend on a fixed server to process data, then it is essentially still centralized. The long-term viability, value, and even ability to resist censorship and risks of that project or network may be questioned.
The importance of 'Walk Away' lies in its ability to uncover the actual dependence of projects or networks on centralized infrastructure through this mental tool, allowing projects or networks to improve effectively, rooted in the philosophical thought of steadfast 'decentralization'.
In 2017, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in an early blog 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 for measuring whether a network is a blockchain network. However, the actual meaning of this term often leads to confusion and misunderstanding.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out: When people discuss a certain decentralization issue, they are actually talking about three independent facets:
Is the architecture centralized or decentralized?
For example, how many computers make up this system? How many computers can crash at any one time while still allowing the system to continue running?
Is it centralized or decentralized politically?
For example, 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 entity? Or is it a non-structured group? If the users and providers of the system are divided, can they still operate as completely independent units?
What is the significance and role of emphasizing 'decentralization'? Vitalik Buterin provided a clear explanation in his blog post in 2018:
Fault tolerance: The probability of unexpected failures in decentralized systems is lower because decentralized systems rely on many independent components, theoretically making the simultaneous failure of independent components relatively low.
Resilience to attacks: Decentralized systems increase the cost of being attacked, damaged, or manipulated because decentralized systems 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.
Prevent collusion: If participants in a decentralized system want to sacrifice the interests of other participants to conspire for their own profit, they have to pay a higher price than those in a centralized system.
Core value: key tests for assessing decentralized projects
From the perspective of the 'Walk Away Test' logic, 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: Currently, almost all Rollups are not mature, and most adopt a supportive means called Training Wheels to ensure operation. However, the supportive means of Training Wheels reflect the Rollup project’s reliance on 'human intervention'; Layer2 networks that do not rely on Training Wheels have lower risks, while those that rely on Training Wheels have higher risks.
To this end, Vitalik Buterin and others classified the dependency level of the Rollup project on Training Wheels into stages: 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 'Layer2 Risk Rating Index' in June 2024, providing risk ratings for 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 security and stability.
Rollup protocols that need to implement Training Wheels typically have not achieved trustlessness or minimal trust. The main reasons may include overly complex code or lack of security audits, a significant potential attack surface for 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, capable of tracking the reality of various projects in meeting established standards or other standards proposed by the community. The competition between projects will no longer be about 'whether they have the right friends', but rather about 'staying aligned' as much as possible according to clear and understandable standards.
From a broader perspective, 'Walk Away' can actually be refined and upgraded into a risk rating tool to measure the decentralization essence and the actual situation of development sustainability 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 method is the separation of powers, rather than power concentration. The project 'alignment' 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'.
