Written by: Winson
Recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik once again made a negative comment on the wallet solution based on MPC technology on Twitter, as shown below:
Twitter Original:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1674032447531495426
This is not the first time Vitalik has criticized the MPC wallet. As early as May 2022, Vitalik expressed similar views. At that time, he even used an angry emoji expression:
Twitter Original:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1527359917161517071
As we all know, Vitalik has always been a technical vane in the Web3 field. He has published many high-quality technical articles on his personal blog and Twitter, which have led to the development of many technologies. Some people even say that one blog of Vitalik can give birth to many startups. These comments are enough to show Vatalik's excellence and outstanding achievements. However, his views on MPC technology are seriously deviated from the facts, and are obviously double-standard and biased, and even generate emotions such as "anger", which is really hard to agree with.
As of the time of posting, several friends have sent me Vitalik’s Twitter content and asked me this question. My first feeling about this is that if a KOL’s influence is used for negative things, the destructive power it causes is also very alarming. Vitalik has always had deep hostility and prejudice against MPC technology, believing that this is the wrong direction. He has always wanted to replace EOA with the smart contract wallet SCA (aka AA, Account Abstraction), and has spared no effort to frequently publicize the defects of EOA and the advantages of SCA (AA), but deliberately avoided the advantages of EOA and the shortcomings of SCA (AA). These views with obvious double standards and prejudices have formed a huge public opinion orientation with the help of Vitalik’s influence, and have even become the current political correctness.
To get back to the basics, MPC is a key management technology. The core significance of its application in Web3 wallets is that it “removes the private key entity” with privacy computing technology, thereby solving the single point failure problem of the private key without destroying the original private key signature function. It brings perfect security while also bringing many other flexible and beneficial features. It can be said that under the premise of proper use of MPC technology, MPC can be said to be the perfect replacement solution for private keys, without a doubt.
In the Web3 ecosystem, there are originally two types of wallets, EOA controlled by private keys and SCA(AA) controlled by Signing Key(s). Among them, EOA is the most commonly used and most familiar wallet type, while SCA(AA) is relatively rare, and people are not very familiar with its Signing Key. Even many unprofessional articles will say "SCA(AA) wallets do not have private keys" when promoting the advantages of SCA(AA). This statement is actually wrong. SCA(AA) just has a richer and more diverse control mechanism. No matter which control mechanism, it still needs something similar (or equivalent) to a private key in the end. This thing is called Signing Key in SCA(AA). You can think of it as the private key of SCA(AA).
As mentioned before, the MPC technology is "using privacy computing technology to remove the private key "entity" and bring more". Obviously, MPC technology can be used in combination with EOA to replace EOA's private key, and can also be used in combination with SCA (AA) to replace SCA (AA)'s Signing Key. These combinations can greatly improve the security and usability of these two types of wallets. So you see, MPC and SCA (AA) are not only not in an opposing competitive relationship, but can also be perfectly combined. The real competitive relationship is actually EOA and SCA (AA). What Vitalik and the Ethereum community have always wanted to do is to use SCA (AA) to replace and kill EOA, which is completely unrelated to MPC technology. But why do Vitalik and the Ethereum community seem to have such deep hostility towards MPC technology?
Possible causes are as follows:
1. Don’t understand MPC but criticize it
Currently, the main MPC wallet cases on the market are the combination of MPC and EOA, and there are not many MPC+SCA(AA) cases. This makes people who don’t know much about MPC technology mistakenly equate "MPC wallet" with "EOA wallet" through biased statistics. Then, a strange tragedy happened, because they all hate EOA and want to eliminate EOA, so after equating MPC with EOA, they also hate MPC. This is essentially a case of not understanding but spraying randomly, but there are actually quite a few such people, and even many developers in the Ethereum community belong to this category.
2. Believe that MPC has dispersed the consensus on the technical route of the Ethereum community
The combination of MPC and EOA can not only perfectly solve many defects of the original EOA wallet based on private key entities (for example, it removes the single point of failure, loss and leakage of private keys and mnemonics, solves the problem of mnemonics being difficult to use, etc.), but can even make the originally bad EOA wallet have many advantages that SCA (AA) often promotes, such as MPC + EOA can actually achieve "multi-signature", key replacement (that is, re-sharing mentioned by Vitalik on Twitter), MFA multi-factor authentication, fine control of the amount spent and even wallet permissions, and even (off-chain) social recovery, etc. These are usually considered to be the advantages and characteristics of the SCA (AA) solution. In the solution after the combination of MPC and EOA, not only can they be realized, but they are even better and more advantageous than the simple SCA (AA) solution, such as better experience, and no need for users to spend Gas, etc. The many benefits brought by the combination of MPC technology and EOA have instantly weakened the original shortcomings of EOA and the advantages of SCA (AA) that Vitalik and the Ethereum community have vigorously promoted. Originally, EOA was beaten by SCA (AA), and the community could have overwhelmingly supported the development of SCA (AA), but now that EOA has the support of MPC, the situation has changed fundamentally in an instant. This has, to some extent, weakened the community's willingness and consensus on the development path of SCA (AA) replacing EOA, distracted the market's resources and attention, and made the brainless supporters who were eager to promote SCA (AA) begin to hate or ridicule MPC technology. The negative comments of the spiritual leader Vitalik on MPC further deepened this opposition.
3. The butt determines the head
Vitalik and the Ethereum community's goal is to maximize Ethereum's adoption rate, so they expect all solutions to be on-chain. They believe that only on-chain solutions are decentralized and secure, and all other off-chain solutions are labeled as centralized and unsafe. From this perspective, EOA and even EOA combined with MPC must die, because they are all off-chain, they are not safe and not decentralized enough, and all users must run in the SCA (AA) wallet on the chain. This is a complete prejudice.
Many people in the Ethereum community, led by Vitalik, are Ethereum maximalists. These people have turned a simple and neutral discussion and comparison of technical solutions into an ideological confrontation of either you or me, and even criticized for the sake of criticizing, to the point that Vitalik has begun to be unreasonable and talk nonsense.
"MPC-based EOA wallets are fundamentally flawed because they cannot revoke private keys", "old holders can still recover private keys", "smart contract wallets are the only option", this kind of statement can be said to be intentional and malicious.
This statement gives a big assumption at the beginning, that is: the private key must be revocable in order to solve the problem of loss or leakage of the private key. Then based on this premise, the technical solution that cannot revoke the private key is criticized. This seems correct, but it is actually a substitution of concepts. Because MPC technology solves the problem of private keys in a higher dimension, that is, there is no private key. MPC wallets can do without private keys throughout the entire life cycle, and it can do without the problem of loss and leakage of private keys. Only when there is a private key will it be troubled by the private key problem and need the ability to "revoke the private key". The MPC wallet does not have the problem of private keys at all, so why does it need to "revoke the private key"? As for the so-called "old holders can still restore the private key", this is really equivalent to a malicious attack, because the MPC wallet can completely defend against this collusion attack through many means, and this collusion attack risk also exists for SCA (AA) wallets. For example, wallet guardians can also collude to attack user assets. Vitalik first criticized the MPC wallet based on a capability that the MPC wallet does not need, and then brought up a risk point that also exists in SCA(AA) (and can be solved). It is irrelevant, but it gives the audience who do not know the truth the wrong impression that MPC's technology is flawed and unsafe. It shows how deep this prejudice and malice are.
Technology is neutral, and no technology can perfectly solve all problems. Developers should not be bound by prejudice and ideology, and should not give up independent research and independent thinking to blindly pursue technology stars. Stars are also human beings, and they also have knowledge blind spots and prejudices that their butts determine their heads. Developers should use the most appropriate technology to provide effective product solutions based on user needs and scenarios with the attitude of benefiting users, keep in-depth exploration of technology, expand technical knowledge reserves, and then flexibly combine and apply technology to the most appropriate place. As long as it is beneficial to users, it is good technology and should be used. But the actual situation in reality is that many developers themselves are unlearned, do not study technology in depth, use technology poorly or incorrectly, but blame the technology itself, lack independent thinking ability, blindly pursue technology stars, blindly stand in line to reject technology A and brag about technology B, which is ignorant and ridiculous. This phenomenon can be said to be very common in the current Ethereum community, and even common in the remarks of some well-known smart contract wallet developers, which is really regrettable.
When we designed the Bitizen product, we fully researched and utilized various technologies and combined them to create the best product based on user needs. In Bitizen, we have brought the advantages of MPC technology to the extreme, and perfectly combined it with EOA and SCA (AA), achieving simultaneous support for MPC + EOA and MPC + SCA (AA), so that the advantages of these two wallets can be maximized under the support of MPC technology, and their disadvantages can be avoided to the greatest extent.
In Bitizen's MPC + EOA solution, users no longer have to worry about the security risks of EOA's private key/mnemonic phrase. They can enjoy security that exceeds that of hardware wallets and multi-signature wallets without feeling, extremely simple, and free of charge, and can continue to enjoy the advantages of EOA wallets: free creation, low Gas, and perfect ecological compatibility. In Bitizen's MPC + SCA (AA) solution, in addition to the top security inherited from MPC + EOA, you can also enjoy the advantages of SCA (AA) wallets such as batch transactions and flexible Gas payments. Of course, these two solutions also have their own disadvantages in comparison. For example, the MPC + EOA solution does not have batch transactions and flexible Gas payment features, while the MPC + SCA (AA) solution has unique advantages but has higher Gas and serious ecological compatibility issues. For example, many dApp applications are completely incompatible with SCA (AA) wallets. As for which solution to choose, users can freely choose according to their actual scenario needs without being constrained by prejudice.
By the way, the on-chain Social Recovery mechanism Vitalik designed for SCA(AA) is expensive, difficult to use, and simply terrible in our opinion. It is a significantly user-friendly feature that is not even as good as a mnemonic. There is no word wallet backup/restore solution, but it is sought after by Vitalik and many SCA(AA) wallet developers as the best solution. It is still hard for us to believe that so many SCA (AA) wallet developers actually put the two keywords "Onboarding the next billion users to Web3" and "Social Recovery" on the homepage of their product official website at the same time. Propaganda never seems to realize that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the two. Bitizen completely abandoned on-chain social recovery in the MPC + SCA(AA) solution, and designed an off-chain recovery mechanism that does not require Gas. It also includes self-service recovery and off-chain social recovery, which is safe, easy to use and even censorship-resistant. Sex is far better than any other option.
In short, in the process of technology selection and practice, Bitizen never emotionally praises or tramples on any technology. We will not blindly follow Vitalik's technical propositions and product design solutions because of his outstanding achievements, and of course we will not reduce our positive evaluation of his achievements because his technical trampling on MPC hurts us. Bitizen cannot represent MPC technology, nor is it a mindless supporter of MPC technology. We believe that only this kind of neutral, independent and in-depth research spirit towards technology and celebrities, coupled with a pragmatic attitude towards users, can bring value that is truly beneficial to the industry and the community.
Finally, here is my personal evaluation of Vitalik: Vitalik is a talented programmer with outstanding achievements, but Vitalik is also a very bad product manager.
