the “middle layer”, which is not part of the core consensus, also it

should not be seen by end-users.

2. The second principle of Freedom frees the users from any restrictions

of using the protocol for not attempting to favor or disfavor Ethereum

contracts/ transactions based on the nature of their purpose; instead, we

strongly favor the approach to set up transaction fees to be incentive-

compatible so that users using the blockchain in bloat-producing ways

internalize the cost of their activities.

3 . The agglomeration of multiple concepts is really the concept of

“message”, which includes “function call” and “event interesting to

outside watchers”, and it is worth separating the two. As opposed to

simply logging all transactions and messages as suggested by the third

principle of generalization for protocol features and opcodes,

Ethereum should embody maximally low-level concepts which can be

combined in arbitrary ways, a bundle of low-level concepts can be

made more efficient by stripping out some of its functionality when it

is not necessary.

4. We often refuse to build in even very common high-level use cases as

intrinsic parts of the protocol as a corollary to generalization with the

understanding that if people really want to do it, they can always

create a sub-protocol inside of a contract, as such a feature can be

simulated via a protocol where users send “signed data packets” and

those data packets can be fed into a specialized contract that processes

them and performs some corresponding function if the data packet is

in some contract-specific sense valid is stated by the fourth principle

of no features.

5 . If a risk-increasing change provides substantial benefits like

generalized state transitions, 5 0× faster block times, consensus

efficiency as stated by the fifth principle of No-Risk-Aversion, we are

okay with higher degrees of risk.

Blockchain level protocols

The multiple devices/ nodes that are connected through the Internet is a

Blockchain, a ledger storing the record of what has come in and what has

gone out in a distributed p2p manner after the transaction has been verified

by all participating nodes.