i want to write about yesterday, but i feel there’s a need for a quick crash course on some web3 fundamentals since a lot of ppl seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. it’s a bit long but trust me it all ties up pretty beautifully together at the end. 1. what a blockchain is blockhains have a very narrow set of requirements, namely being a decentralized state machine. when people refer to blockchains they usually mean permissionless public blockchains, which extends the previous definition and excludes things like enterprise or permissioned blockchains. but focusing on the technical requirements of a blockchain misses the essence of what a blockchain is. just like companies, countries, religious institutions etc. a blockchain is a social enterprise. and a social enterprise operates a certain way because of shared history and culture and values, and more importantly - it is something that is constantly evolving. also worth noting here that a social enterprise is not an island. just like a company can also be part of one or more countries, a blockchain social enterprise operates as part of the real world. so considerations like law, money and power are not isolated, they have a wider context. a lot of crypto ppl have a “no true scotsman” fallacy when it comes to blockchains, but purist views like “code is law” that might be adopted by a certain blockchain as a core value is just that - a core value of a certain social enterprise, not exclusive membership criteria of crypto. 2. censorship resistance censorship resistance doesn’t mean censorship is not possible, it means there are financial incentives not to censor, and there’s no central third party trusted to determine what the state is network operators being able to censor transactions is expected behavior in every single blockchain including bitcoin and ethereum whether or not they do censor is purely a matter of self serving financial interests it’s called capitalism btw and it might not be perfect, but it's the fairest way humanity has figured out so far to make decisions 3. decentralization this is the trickiest part because it is both not a well defined term and at the same time a term used by crypto ppl to describe basically everything. decentralization at its core is meant to ensure there’s no centralized control by one entity. it’s there to reduce the need to trust 3rd parties and to increase censorship resistance. there are different metrics to assess the level of decentralization, the number of operators is a naive and pretty bad metric, the nakamoto coefficient (google it) is a much better metric, but there is no ideal way to evaluate decentralization. the much bigger (and to date unsolvable no matter what anyone tells you) issue with decentralization, is that there’s a catch 22 involved. in completely free market conditions there is inevitable consolidation of power by a small number of established players (so less decentralization and more centralization), and any measures implemented to block these free market dynamics are either ineffective or introduce centralization by gatekeeping. once again - capitalism is not perfect but it’s the best system we have bottom line is decentralization has a practical limit and it’s not very high - but decentralization is not a 1/0 game, it’s a parameter that helps with the robustness of the system - the higher it is, the more robust the system is. * the last thing worth noting is that imo the real breakthrough in both censorship resistance and decentralization will come from advanced cryptography research around privacy, specifically cryptographic compute - if all activity is encrypted, there’s no way to discriminate against specific actors or actions; if a valid state change is independently verifiable and can be aggregated without collisions, consolidation can be effectively mitigated. does the market actually want that? that’s a question yet to be answered. i won’t go into deep details here because it’s still purely theoretical, but what i’m saying is the real long term solutions here is technology that is not possible or practical today. now let’s talk about yesterday yesterday a devastating hack happened on cetus, a defi protocol on sui. a malicious actor exploited a bug to steal massive amounts of money from a dex. money that belongs to people and businesses that trust the sui social enterprise with their money. the attacker started extracting the money, and after extracting $60m, the network operators decided collectively to censor the attacker so they can’t take out most of the money - another $160m. it was quite simply an action taken by network participants to protect other network participants. that action got mixed reactions. it’s safe to say that the majority of people and businesses within the sui social enterprise had a positive and thankful reaction to that action, while the majority of people and businesses outside the sui social enterprise had a negative and cautionary reaction to that action. and the thing here is that there’s justice on both sides. anyone with even the slightest sense of nuance understands that, but things tend to get very polarized and binary in crypto, especially when there’s so much at stake. On the one hand, not censoring allows a thief to walk away with a tremendous amount of stolen money, devastating families and businesses, on the other hand, coordinated censorship can be a slippery slope, leading to defeating the purpose of why we’re all using blockchains in the first place. my point here is that there isn’t a right or wrong answer. sui as a social enterprise answered that question a certain way yesterday (censorship). i think it was the right choice for what it's worth, but it doesn’t matter what i think, neither i nor anyone else has unilateral control over the network, there has to be consensus. and as i said, social enterprises change over time. ethereum as a social enterprise chose to fork after the dao hack, the ethereum social enterprise today is less likely to do that. everyone here at the sui social enterprise will keep answering these questions as they come along, and that will shape its history, culture and values. i believe sui tech is the best tech in blockchain today, and i believe it will keep leading the pack when it comes to tech (potentially also leading the way in advanced cryptographic research to solve a lot of the unsolvable problems of web3). the sui social enterprise however is very young, only 2 years old, and is only now starting to face adversity that will help shape and sharpen its culture and values. and this brings us back full circle to my initial reaction that basically sums up how i feel about the last 24 hours. iota forked sui and has the same tech, but the sui community - network operators, mysten, project teams, users - are special, the culture is special, the north star we’re all following is special, which is why we are launching @ikadotxyz on sui, and why i believe the future of sui is bright. thank you for attending my ted talk @SuiNetwork is inevitable