“Most public blockchains face the problem of power centralization of certain nodes, which prevents them from achieving community organization.”

Many public blockchain projects, represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum, are struggled in its community governance and failed to form efficient collaboration mechanisms among its community members. This is mainly because the power of nodes is too large; or the issue in aligning the interest of the operators of the nodes, developers, and token holders.

Further, nodes in the system (or miners in the traditional sense) and the technical teams (or developers) who build the system and the users of the system have no way to reach a consensus through an on-chain way, or we say recognized by the “system.” Existing blockchain technology can’t provide a tool to support on-chain collaboration, so they can only choose to go back to off-chain methods. These methods are via traditional social media and other means.

Even if the three parties (node, developer, token holder) form a consensus on a upgrade via a off-chain environment, consensus cannot be effectively implemented on the system. This is due to the fact that it's up to the node (or miners in the traditional sense) to implement the upgrading. Moreover, when one particular upgrade may not be of benefit to the miner/node whereas it may benefit the developer and/or token holders, the current blockchain technology cannot forcibly bypass the node to implement the upgrade. The power of the node is greater than the power of the entire community.

This is why I think PoW will definitely be a very large issue for Ethereum. Since there is already a vested interest group in the current Ethereum ecosystem, these groups will not easily give up the benefits they have already obtained.

This makes the system have huge inertia; they must pay a large cost to upgrade the system. So far, there are over 1,000 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), but each time they need to upgrade, they have to go wait more than a year, and may only pass a few EIPs in that time frame. We also need to consider the huge uncertainty they face and the risk of a hard fork failure.

If the upgrade and improvements of the blockchain system have high friction and associated cost, then when should we expect it to provide us with a truly useful infrastructure that can be applied? The ability to upgrade is the biggest hurdle of a distributed system and is now a key point that hinders further development of the entire blockchain world.

Therefore, we need an on-chain upgrade mechanism to ensure the consensus of the whole community, without affecting the entire distributed blockchain. A rapid upgrade is achieved in the case of system asset security.

We want a blockchain organization to have the power to determine its own direction. In this system, nodes, developers and token holders, become an inseparable part of this organization, and we want the blockchain system to contain an effective tool for changing the current situation where the power of the node is greater than the consensus reached by the community.

This is a very big issue and Nebulas has been very concerned about it. We believe Nebulas NOVA is ready for the most basic version of the tools needed to solve this problem. This year, we will take a look at its effects.