From a long-term perspective, what the Ethereum Foundation should address

Ethereum prices are gloomy after the merge. As a mainnet developer, I would like to leave an opinion on Ethereum's next upgrade.

The initial purpose of Ethereum was not to create currency, but to create smartcontract. In other words, the reason for Ethereum's existence was to include general commerce in the blockchain. Other than that, it is not an exaggeration to say that nothing has progressed from Bitcoin. The shorter block time from 10 minutes to 10 seconds is not a genius idea, but just common sense. In short, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is only the difference between Turing incompleteness and Turing completeness. So, what is the current state of Ethereum’s Turing completeness, that is, smartcontract?

In my opinion, what smartcontracts currently has is nothing but DeFi, NFT, and P2E. And all of them are still stuck in the category of "printing money." There are many reasons for this situation, but the most important of them are the following two. These are decentralization and gas cost.

Decentralization is not omnipotent. Decentralization is sometimes desirable and sometimes undesirable. It is like the fact that democracy is not desirable at the lower stage of developing countries and is desirable only in developed countries. Men and women may be equal, but parents and children cannot be equal. If Tim Cook steps down from Apple and leaves the company to the democracy of its employees, Apple will go bankrupt in less than three years.

There is no problem in itself that smartcontracts are operated based on decentralization. The problem is that the creation stage of smartcontracts, that is, even the"deploy" stage, is carried out in a decentralized manner. Therefore, phishing smartcontracts that explicitly input public and private keys can also be deployed without any restrictions. Therefore, there is even a site that evaluates the security level of smartcontracts. I heard the business is booming.

Currently, Apple's App Store and Google Play adopt a censorship system. And now they are successfully making money. However, the censorship system is adopted only at the deploy stage. Once deployed, iOS or Android will take control and humans will not intervene. Therefore, the only point in question is the deploy stage. Among the words that people in the blockchain industry often use,

"Don't trust. Verify!." It is OK. But The words "Code is Law". It is not OK. Code can't be Law in the long run.

The next issue is the gas cost. Even if smartcontracts are deployed, gas costs are incurred when the transaction is executed on smartcontracts after deploy. In the same scene, there are no gas costs in the Apple Store or Google Play. By the way, Ethereum's gas costs are extremely expensive.

As is well known to DApp programmers, gas costs actually exist only for expedient purposes. It was only created to prevent the act of repeating A->B and B->A transference indefinitely. It's a very simple prank, but no way to defence it has been developed, at least "priorarily." This is not a simple problem, because we need to detect not only between the two AB, but also the cycling type such as "ABCDEF...A" and the likes. However, it is possible "postly". In other words, it is possible to accept the gas costs and return it if it turns out to be not an attack.

Refund of gas costs, adoption of censorship, these two are absolute premises for smartcontracts to be activated. Namely, these are the absolute premises for Ethereum to achieve its original purpose of birth and success in the long run.