A Crypto "Social Anxiety Test": Why Ethereum Chooses "Slow" in the Efficiency Race

Ethereum’s ten years have been like a continuous “social anxiety test.” It’s not about verifying whether individual nodes can respond quickly, but about testing whether a decentralized system can remain stable in an environment of complete strangers and zero trust. While everyone else pursues speed and user experience, Ethereum is doing something seemingly uninteresting but critically important: repeatedly verifying that it won’t collapse under the harshest conditions.

Recently, if you’ve been paying close attention to the Ethereum ecosystem, you’ll notice increasing internal conflicts within the community. On one side are deep technical discussions about Rollup architectures, interoperability, ZK proofs, separation of block proposers, and other details; on the other side are straightforward questions like “Why is Ethereum so slow,” “Why do we keep ‘discussing’ instead of acting,” and “Why is the token price so stagnant.”

These seemingly different debates all point to the same fundamental question: What does Ethereum truly want to become?

A Decade of Trust Testing: Can the System Operate Normally Without Oversight?

To answer this, we can’t just look at the past one or two years; we need to zoom out to a ten-year perspective—see what Ethereum has steadfastly maintained during this time.

An often overlooked fact worth pondering: In the past decade, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or transaction rollback. Every day, every hour, every minute, this system runs nonstop 7×24×365.

This is not luck. In contrast, high-performance blockchains like Solana and Sui have taken a more direct route—reducing validator numbers, increasing hardware requirements, centralizing ordering and execution—to achieve extreme speed and smooth user experience. But the Ethereum community believes that such acceleration often comes at an invisible cost: system fragility.

In other words, Ethereum’s “slowness” isn’t because it can’t go faster; it’s because from the very beginning, it has asked a harder question: When more participants are involved, malicious behavior is more common, and external pressures increase, can this system still operate securely?

This is the core of the so-called “social anxiety test”—it’s not about whether you can perform perfectly within your social circle, but whether you can stick to your principles in an environment of complete strangers and hostility. Ethereum internalized this challenge into its architectural choices.

Value Alignment Like a Social Anxiety Test: Not Loyalty, But a Mutual Contract

Because of this, understanding Ethereum requires accepting an uncomfortable premise: Ethereum does not pursue “maximized efficiency” as its sole goal, but demands “trustworthiness even in the worst-case scenarios.”

This premise changes the entire system logic. Within this framework, many seemingly technical issues are fundamentally value choices:

• Should we sacrifice decentralization for transaction speed?
• Should we introduce powerful nodes to lower barriers?
• Should we delegate security assumptions to a few to improve user experience?

Ethereum’s answer is often “No.” This also explains why the community remains almost instinctively cautious about taking shortcuts—“Can we do it” always takes a backseat to “Should we do it.”

In this context, the concept of “alignment” (Alignment) becomes the most controversial topic. Some worry it could become an excuse for moral coercion or even a tool for power dynamics. These concerns are not unfounded.

As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in “Making Ethereum alignment legible”:

If alignment means whether you have the “right social circle,” then the very concept has already failed.

His proposed solution isn’t to abandon alignment but to make it explainable, decomposable, and openly discussable. In his framework, alignment isn’t a fuzzy political stance but a set of concrete, scrutinizable attributes:

Technical Alignment: Does your proposal rely on Ethereum’s security consensus? Do you support open source and open standards?

Economic Alignment: Does your ecosystem activity promote long-term ETH value accumulation, or is it just one-way extraction?

Ethical/Spiritual Alignment: Are you contributing to the public good, or merely engaging in predatory rapid growth?

From this perspective, alignment is more like a reciprocal social contract—Ethereum’s ecosystem allows chaos, competition, and even fierce internal competition among Layer 2s, but ultimately, all these activities should feed back into the main chain that provides security, consensus, and settlement. This logic itself is a continuous “social anxiety test”—to see if, without central authority oversight, you still adhere to this intangible contract.

Decentralization and Censorship Resistance: Why Worst-Case Design Matters So Much

Supporting this contract are Ethereum’s two long-standing pillars: decentralization and censorship resistance.

Many misunderstand “decentralization” as simply having more nodes and everyone running a node. In reality, Ethereum’s definition is: The system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This means the protocol shouldn’t rely on specific sequencers, coordinators, or companies. More importantly, the cost of running nodes shouldn’t be so high that only professional institutions can afford it—ordinary people must still be able to verify that the system is functioning according to the rules.

Therefore, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth, and state bloat—even if this slows down some short-term performance metrics. To Ethereum, a system that is extremely fast but cannot be verified by ordinary users has fundamentally lost its “permissionless” nature—it is no longer a network anyone can participate in and oversee, but a platform where a few hold the power.

Another often misunderstood value is censorship resistance. Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. Instead, from the start, it presumes participants may seek profit, power may concentrate, and external political pressures will eventually emerge. Therefore, censorship resistance isn’t about ensuring “no one can ever censor” (which is impossible), but about ensuring that even if someone attempts to censor, the system has internal mechanisms that allow the censored transactions to still be included on-chain.

This is why Ethereum places such importance on separation of proposers and builders, decentralized construction, and economic incentives. Not because they are elegant in theory, but because they can maintain system integrity even in the worst-case scenarios.

Many ask, “Do such extreme situations really happen in reality?” But the point is, if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it isn’t worth entrusting value in the real world.

Final Words: The Underlying Spirit of a Decade of Traversal

Some criticize Ethereum for “discussing philosophy while others are already running ahead.” But from another perspective, it’s precisely these seemingly trivial philosophical discussions that have helped Ethereum avoid the fate of repeatedly tearing down and rebuilding.

Whether it’s the Rollup-centric scaling approach, the gradual introduction of ZK proofs, or innovations like interoperability, fast finality, and shorter time slots, they all follow the same premise: All performance improvements must be compatible with existing security and trust assumptions.

This explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative but steady.” It’s not that it doesn’t pursue efficiency; it refuses to trade short-term gains for potential systemic collapse in the future.

Currently, the Ethereum PoS staking withdrawal queue has been mostly cleared, while the staking deposit queue continues to grow, with over 1.57 million ETH locked in this system long-term. Amid endless debates and skepticism, many participants are voting with their actions, supporting this seemingly “slow” system.

This phenomenon itself perhaps best illustrates the core: Ethereum’s ten-year spirit isn’t about becoming the fastest, but about becoming the most trustworthy. In an era dominated by “efficiency first” and TVL as king, this unwavering adherence to fundamental principles is what makes Web3 most scarce and most worth protecting.

The essence of the social anxiety test is to choose to uphold principles even when no one is watching and no one is forcing you. This is precisely the spirit that Ethereum embodies.