Implications

After the Assessment

The research question has been answered: Ethereum is suitable as fundamental digital infrastructure, both as of the reference date of March 2026, which I have designated the current state, and in the state under full implementation of the roadmap (the target state). Under a closer criterion-by-criterion comparison of the two states, the one under the roadmap fulfills the stated conditions more completely, as expected, but remains bound to conditions in equal measure. That is the result of the work, and it is no longer the subject of this chapter.

No assessment is made here, and accordingly no judgment is rendered. From here, the register returns to that of the preface, because the answer provided in Chapter 6 now allows two questions to be answered that have remained open since the beginning of this work. The first concerns the actors who interact with the network: those who are actively building on the infrastructure (institutions, and with them the developers not separately mentioned in 1.1), those who put their money behind it (investors and users), and those who regulate it (politics and law). Section 1.1 noted that they conduct their due diligence carefully, but that in doing so they act under an assumption that eluded examination because there was no standard to test it against. The question that follows from this is, in substance: what does the assumption of permanent existence rest on, the assumption under which those who build on the system, trust it, or regulate it already act, when no authority stands behind it? The second is the naively posed question that originally inspired me to undertake this work: “What does such a cryptographic system make possible beyond decentralized payment, and does it even need to go beyond it?” The resolution of both questions is the subject of Chapter 7.

The Picture When Everything Is Built

To answer the questions and maintain a clear thread, I first sketch the features of the target state as a whole. From them I can derive a simplified definition that makes the questions easier to answer.

A block that carries a multiple of today’s volume costs the verifier exactly as much as an empty one. This sentence is the pivot of the picture that emerges when the roadmap is fully built. Validators no longer recompute transactions individually. They verify a proof of correct block execution generated by a prover, a specialized machine that performs the execution once on behalf of all. This verification takes only a few milliseconds, regardless of how many transactions the block contains. Network capacity scales without increasing verification costs. Today Ethereum processes between 15 and 30 transactions per second at 60 million Gas, depending on transaction complexity. The target for the base layer is roughly 10,000, reachable over the long term through a staged expansion of execution capacity. At the same time, participants keep their sovereignty: anyone who does not trust the cryptographic proof can continue to execute and verify transactions in full themselves, as before.

This verification runs directly on ordinary end devices such as laptops or smartphones. The storage requirement for a verifying node falls from 2 to 4 terabytes to under 100 megabytes, while the RAM requirement drops to under 1 gigabyte and the compute load to a single processor core. Initial synchronisation, which currently takes hours or days, shortens to a few seconds. One example is the client Helios, which runs in a browser tab and on Raspberry Pi-class hardware without holding its own copy of the blockchain.

This stands in sharp contrast to current practice, in which roughly 70 percent of users access the network through centralized infrastructure providers such as Infura or Alchemy and must rely on their data without independent verification. In the target state, what is now a necessity becomes a choice: anyone who wants to verify can do so on their own device, and the data required for this is drawn from a decentralized peer-to-peer network. No single provider stands between users any longer.

The account itself also changes in character: where the protocol previously dictated how an account authorises a transaction, it will delegate that task to the account itself. Its validation rules become freely programmable.

For users this means that they can unlock their account with a fingerprint, making the end device itself the wallet. If the device is lost, several trusted parties they have chosen themselves can restore access together, without any one of them being able to access the balance alone. Network fees can also be paid in any token such as USDT, or the application can cover them in the background. The signature scheme can also be upgraded to quantum-resistant cryptography.

Under the same precondition, the fully implemented roadmap, the confirmation time of a payment is no longer measured in minutes. After roughly 2 seconds a secured commitment from a validator is available, after approximately 13 seconds the deterministic confirmation on Layer 1 follows, and after roughly 36 seconds irreversible finality is reached. By comparison, this currently takes 12.8 minutes. Each waiting period represents a clearly defined security guarantee for the user, with even the strongest guarantee now measured in seconds.

The decision about which transactions are included in a block no longer lies with a single actor. Per slot, 16 randomly selected validators work with the proposer to compile a binding list of transactions to be included (Inclusion List), with a single honest validator among the 16 being sufficient to ensure that a bypassed transaction still makes it onto the list. A proposer who ignores the list loses the votes of the attesters and thus the entire block.

Since Builders will submit their bids directly to the blockchain, Relays become redundant as well. Roughly 15 percent of blocks are currently routed through them, with censorship filters such as OFAC lists applied in the process. In addition, transaction content remains encrypted until final sequencing, so that no one can selectively exclude transactions whose content they do not know. Censorship resistance is thereby anchored in the protocol. Previously it depended on the good conduct of operators. It holds as long as the validator network remains broadly distributed.

The security guarantees of the base layer do not end at its system boundaries. If a Rollup delegates the sequencing of its blocks to the proposers of Layer 1 and has its state transitions validated by their consensus, it requires no dedicated sequencer, no separate proof system, no security council, and no governance of its own. What remains is a pure execution environment with its own fee market and state.

Transactions between two such Rollups no longer require bridges with additional trust assumptions. This applies to Rollups that remain EVM-equivalent and fully cede their block ordering to the base layer. Since implementation ultimately rests with the operators, a wide range of integration levels remains, from full convergence to the sovereign chain that shares almost no interfaces with the base layer.

What It Is at Its Core

That is the assembled picture of the target state. From here it can be simplified into a general definition of the subject.

Ethereum is at its core a state, a ledger of who owns what and which contractual rules for changing it are binding. Four properties define it.

It is shared: all participants maintain the same state, rather than each their own version with its own truth. It is verifiable: every entry can be checked against the rules of the protocol without a third party needing to attest to its correctness. It is binding: an entry that has once settled can no longer be annulled by any subsequent authority. And it is centerless: no entity exists that could maintain, alter, or shut it down unilaterally. This description holds for the current state as much as for the state after full implementation of the technical roadmap. The four properties are present today, but they are not fully realized everywhere. Full implementation of the roadmap makes them scalable, accessible, and protocol-enforced. Today their realization rests on market conditions.

The evaluation framework did not capture these four properties, because no criterion was directed at them. The twelve criteria are derived from infrastructures that are owned and externally financed. Where Ethereum departs from this pattern, the framework has no measuring point.

A ledger in itself is nothing unusual, as institutions like banks have maintained registers for centuries. What makes this state reach far beyond a mere account book are three fundamental principles.

The ownership of an entry rests on a cryptographic proof. Anyone who can furnish this proof has absolute control over the entry at the protocol level. No bank, no exchange, and no authority can grant or revoke that control. This is a different kind of ownership from that which is conferred. It rests on the proof.

Furthermore, the rules written into the state enforce themselves. As soon as the defined condition is met, the associated consequence executes automatically, without any ordering, supervising, or enforcing authority. What is enforced is the pure execution of the rule. The protocol executes a flawed rule with the same reliability as a flawless one.

Finally, every entry can be freely combined with every other, without the parties needing to know one another or ask permission. In their strongest form, two operations on the same layer happen in a single, indivisible step, so that they either succeed together or fail together. Across the boundary between different layers this no longer holds, but the principle of free combinability persists.

A pure payment system uses only the simplest of the three, the mere transfer of balances. Before closing this picture, two questions remain open: what the assumption of permanent existence rests on, the assumption under which those who build on this state, trust it, or regulate it already act, and what it makes possible beyond decentralized payment.

Who Builds, Who Trusts, Who Regulates

Institutional actors have long been acting under this assumption. J.P. Morgan’s tokenized money market fund operates exclusively on Ethereum, and Crédit Agricole issued a MiCA-compliant euro Stablecoin on the same chain through their custody subsidiary, both as documented in 1.1. Both institutions subjected the system to a detailed practical due diligence beforehand. The more far-reaching assumption, however, eluded examination: that the blockchain will still run reliably in ten years, treat all participants equally, cannot be shut down unilaterally, and will enable future, as yet unknown, forms of use. What the actors presuppose in practice are permanence, neutrality, the impossibility of unilateral shutdown, and openness. These are the four properties of the state, viewed from the perspective of practice. The first group acting under these premises builds directly on the system.

Anyone developing on Ethereum benefits from the architecture from the very first moment. A developer creating a new DeFi protocol can integrate the liquidity pools of Uniswap, the lending markets of Aave, and the Stablecoin logic of MakerDAO into their own application, without requiring a contractual relationship with these protocols, without their approval, and without their operators ever needing to learn of the integration. In this structure the classical counterparty risk disappears. Permanence shows in practice in that Smart Contracts from 2017 continue to execute unchanged to this day. The only systematic exceptions are protocol upgrades adjusting transaction fees, which in rare cases affected code that assumed fixed fee values. An institution anchoring an application here receives neutrality and interface stability without contracts, negotiations, or renewals.

These guarantees apply primarily to the base layer, however, on which the fewest actors build directly. In practice there is a hurdle. Users accessing a DeFi service on a Rollup via MetaMask move across four layers of trust that the Ethereum protocol does not directly secure. Security conditions vary considerably between them. While the Base network has an exit window of zero days, Arbitrum One’s stands at 17 days. The use of platform-specific functions such as Stylus or specific precompiles also makes switching to alternative systems more difficult. The original expectations of the blockchain shift to an upstream layer with its own operators, deadlines, and switching costs. Even after full implementation of the technical roadmap, the choice of layer remains decisive, as its implementation rests with the operators and ranges from fully adapted to entirely independent networks. Chapter 4 describes this constraint as a discrepancy between the theoretical possibilities of the protocol and actual operational practice. For developers this describes the real decision: the chosen layer determines the actual security.

Investors, by contrast, make fewer technical decisions but place great trust in the system. Institutional actors trust in the network’s continued existence over the next ten years and point to uninterrupted availability despite fifteen major upgrades in the past. This study puts a timeframe on that trust. Over a five-to-ten-year horizon Ethereum looks stable: the upgrade process runs reliably, economic security covers roughly 26 billion US dollars, and the validator infrastructure is intact. Over a twenty-year timeframe, unresolved issues, namely uncontrolled chain data growth, the unsettled long-term reward structure for security, and the outstanding transition to quantum-resistant cryptography, jeopardize sustainability. The three risks are not equally far along. For data growth, theoretical solutions exist that, according to Chapter 6, rest on unproven research without a concrete implementation plan. For the long-term financing of network security there is as yet no agreed concept, while the transition to quantum resistance is already being tested in testnets. The reference to past stability thus supports only the medium-term outlook. The expectation of decade-long permanence, as Section 1.1 describes it, goes beyond the currently demonstrable foundations. One feature without parallel in the seven reference systems examined is that the value of the native currency directly determines the security of the entire system. Investors hold no claim against a company. With their capital they directly underpin the integrity of the system.

End users rely on the same assumptions without knowing it, even though Section 1.1 does not name them explicitly. They benefit from direct, inviolable control over their digital assets through their own keys, without dependence on intermediaries such as banks or authorities. Resilience showed vividly in May 2023, when after two successive disruptions network participation fell below the critical two-thirds threshold. The protocol responded autonomously, incrementally reducing the stakes of inactive validators and restoring full functionality after 96 minutes without human intervention or external coordination. Classical systems such as the Internet’s address directory, the SWIFT network, or power grids require manual intervention, contingency plans, or physical action in the event of failures. Ethereum’s protocol requires no such external assistance.

Despite the technical strengths, there is a gap between what is possible and what is used. While any user can in principle run their own node and verify the chain independently, in practice hardware requirements, maintenance, and technical knowledge tend to stop them. Many users voluntarily outsource custody to centralized exchanges. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to securing the network. The minimum requirement of 32 ETH corresponded, at the reference-date rate, to roughly 67,000 US dollars, and the share of privately operated, independent validators stands below one percent of total volume. Service providers lower the barrier to amounts as small as 0.01 ETH, but take control of validation in return. Economic access is thus open, while effective control over the infrastructure remains behind technical and financial barriers. According to Chapter 6, the constraints, including the 32-ETH threshold and the upstream user interfaces, survive full implementation of the roadmap, because no feature addresses their structural cause.

For government regulators, the picture is different: their point of access is the application layer. The US GENIUS Act, signed on 18 July 2025, regulates Stablecoin issuers with regard to reserve requirements, transparency obligations, and licensing, but excludes the underlying protocol layer. It regulates Circle and Tether as issuers while affecting neither the Ethereum protocol itself nor the underlying Smart Contracts governing USDC and USDT. For decentralized applications without identifiable issuers, no comparable framework yet exists, which limits legal reach to the application layer.

While private actors delegate responsibility to the protocol, regulators seek concrete points of contact. Since the protocol itself offers no addressable party, the focus shifts to central interfaces. Three commercial actors control roughly 93 percent of block production, led by Titan with 51.2 percent. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index stands at 3,554 and clearly exceeds the US threshold for highly concentrated markets of 2,500. Node operation is also concentrated among a few cloud providers: roughly 59 percent of hosted Execution Layer nodes run on three of them. Geographically, 39 percent are in the US, 14.5 percent in Germany, and 14 percent in China, so roughly 53 percent fall in just two countries. State interventions therefore target the physical concentration points.

The significance of this concentration became clear in November 2022, when 79 percent of blocks filtered transactions from sanctioned addresses. The restriction, however, caused only minimal delays of a few blocks. At present the share stands at roughly 15 percent, as the largest actor, Titan, deliberately refrains from filtering. This decline occurred without protocol changes, driven purely by market incentives. The Van Loon v. Treasury ruling of November 2024 and the OFAC delisting of Tornado Cash in March 2025 fell in the same period. Such regulatory access remains unstable, however, as it rests on changeable market structures. According to Chapter 6, high concentration at the top of block production will persist even after full implementation of the technical roadmap.

The system operates under the law but diverges from its classical mechanisms of access. The interface between programmatic and state enforcement remains largely unsettled. Chapter 3 illustrates this in the comparison of infrastructures: none of the examined platforms possesses physical enforcement power. The power grid can cut supply, the Internet can block data, and SWIFT can exclude participants, but none of these systems can exercise coercion against persons. The legal system, by contrast, retains its full power over persons, companies, and locations as the overarching authority. On the decentralized blockchain, however, legal enforcement finds no direct addressable party.

The absence of a central pause button illustrates the independence. In the event of critical errors the system cannot be stopped. The only answer remains an emergency hard fork requiring the coordination of all client teams. The Prysm bug of December 2025 showed that it can be avoided. The diversity of client software absorbed the effects. The stability rests, however, on ongoing social coordination and does not represent an automatic equilibrium. There is no pause button, because it contradicts centerlessness. Anyone introducing such a control authority would destroy the very foundation of the system. The permanent existence of the infrastructure thus depends on no single actor. It rests on the interplay of the centerless structure and the ongoing social coordination that sustains it. This answers the first core question. The second turns to what is possible beyond pure value transfer.

It Was Never Just About Payment

I noted in the preface that enormous sums are in motion, that grand narratives about payment, identity, and the management of one’s own assets without an intermediary are circulating, and that it nonetheless remains strangely unclear what the thing is at its core. What I was looking for was the core. Payment was the word I used to outline it, and what lies beyond it remained open. The state has now been named, together with its three principles. The answer begins with the word the question carries with it without ever clarifying it.

For me, “payment” meant the transfer of funds and autonomy over one’s own keys. Both rest on the first of the three principles. Anyone who can furnish the cryptographic proof has absolute control over the entry at the protocol level, without a bank, an exchange, or an authority granting it. The mere transfer of balances is the simplest action that follows from this control. It changes a number in two places and is done. It demands little of the state. The state must recognize the proof and bindingly record the change. A payment asks no more of it than that.

What I called payment is one of three principles, and it uses that principle in its simplest form. This answers what the thing is at its core: not payment. The core is the state. Payment is one way of using it. Anyone who describes Ethereum as a payment system describes a use it permits, and leaves two of the three principles unmentioned. The question of what lies beyond payment is therefore not a question about add-on functions. It is the question of what problem the two remaining principles solve that would otherwise remain unsolved.

What remains are self-enforcement and free combinability. Both address a problem older than any technology, one that Chapter 3 attributed to the legal system. How do strangers arrive at binding agreements? Economic history shows that before the development of institutional law, transactions functioned only within clan, family, or ethnic networks, because reputation-based enforcement does not scale beyond small groups. Chapter 3 elaborated this through Avner Greif’s study. Only state-enforced contract law opened cooperation to millions of strangers. Anyone wishing to bind themselves to an agreement previously had to know the other party, and the reach of that agreement ended at the reach of the group that could punish a breach. The legal system, which appeared as enforcement power in the preceding section, stands here on the other side: as the thing that makes agreements between strangers possible in the first place. It differs from all other infrastructures in that behind its enforcement stands the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Binding commitment among strangers previously existed only under an authority capable of intervening when necessary.

Self-enforcement generates binding commitment without such an authority. As soon as the defined precondition occurs, the associated consequence executes within the system automatically, without anyone ordering, supervising, or enforcing it. The example lies in the protocol itself. The Slashing system penalises validator misconduct without any authority being involved. The enforcement is algorithmic and deterministic. When the defined conditions arise, the prescribed consequence follows, whether or not the affected party consents.

Free combinability continues where self-enforcement begins. Every entry can be freely combined with every other, without the parties needing to know one another or ask permission. Chapter 6 captures the combinatorial property in its sharpest form as the exponential and permissionless interplay of arbitrarily many contracts producing constructions that no one foresaw. Both principles together yield what lies beyond the transfer of balances: binding cooperation between strangers without an authority to enforce it. What contract law gained in reach, it gained at the price of an authority with access. The state holds the reach and omits the price.

Two limits accompany this achievement. The first is that only the execution is taken over. The correctness of the rule is not decided by the protocol, it executes a flawed one with the same reliability as a flawless one. The second limit lies in the expressive capacity of code. Disputes over intentions, interpretations, negligent conduct, and non-contractual claims remain reliant on institutional enforcement. The legal system is not replaced. What arises is a complementary enforcement layer for cases where institutional enforcement is too slow or too costly, does not reach across jurisdictions, or was never designed for the use case at all.

The second half of the question remains. Does the system need to go beyond payment? It is the question of an investor wanting to know whether they carry complexity that no one needs.

For payment the answer is no. The extra is ballast. Anyone who only transfers needs no self-enforcement, because a transfer enforces nothing beyond itself. They need no combinability, because a transfer connects with nothing. Both principles would lie in the state and remain unused. A payment system that carries them along carries them for nothing, and the investor’s suspicion is on point here.

For infrastructure the answer flips. Chapter 2 established, following Brett Frischmann, that infrastructure defines itself by what it enables, not by what it is. It serves as a factor of production for downstream activities and is not an end product. A system that only pays is an end product. Self-enforcement and combinability are the condition for the concept of infrastructure to apply at all. What a payment system would leave unused is precisely what a builder reaches for. Without self-enforcement there would be nothing to anchor, and without combinability nothing to connect to.

My naively posed question was thereby exactly the distinction that Chapter 2 later derived as conceptual work: end product or input. The preface states that it is at this concept that the broad opening question sharpens into a testable one. The system does not decide the distinction. It permits both. Anyone asking the question decides it in the asking, because in asking they indicate what use they intend to make of the system.

Both questions are answered. One hung on an assumption that eluded examination for lack of a standard, the other on a word I used without knowing what it referred to. What emerges from them applies not to Ethereum alone. I chose the network as a representative because the question had to be tested against something concrete, and the answer applies to the class of such systems. It does not apply to the question of which system ultimately prevails. What the writing has done to my own perspective belongs in the final lines of this work.

More Than Software: A Few Last Words

I am writing this final section of the final chapter after almost seven months of work, research, reading, learning, writing, iteration, conversations, and a great deal of reflection. To be honest, I do not know how one truly concludes a work like this. These lines will probably turn out to be one more round of the countless iterations, after I have asked an AI to place what is written into its structural and thematic context.

This self-initiated work has taught me much. The very fact of approaching such a topic and finding a starting point was a task in itself. Finding a logical thesis and an entry point from a banal question and a certain uncertainty, one that during a brutal market phase nearly tipped into frustration, felt like that meme: a small knight with a drawn sword facing an impossibly large one.

However impenetrable such a start without an externally provided framework may be, it enabled me to become independent. Reading through the learning section of ethereum.org within a few days, which ranged from beginner articles to more complex concepts and architectures, already signalled that the work would be longer than expected. The partly new information that I could not yet place, and that did not answer my motivating question, led me for exactly that reason to build a genuine framework and redefine the question. In this way I found a path into a work undertaken without academic supervision and not intended to be limited to the usual eight to fifteen pages.

With a clearly defined question and a fundamental framework to test it against, a horizon and structure suddenly opened up that made it possible to work with certainty. From that point the research extended across theories of infrastructure as well as physical, philosophical, political, and geographical topics and much else. Alongside the research and the various perspectives, a chapter structure built around evaluating a state provided a clear thread to follow, one that made the work feel more ordered, even as the subject kept moving. For the subject develops continuously, with pivots, iterations, and refinements occurring almost weekly. Without the division into the reference-date state (the work’s “current state”) and the emerging state (“target state”), it would have been almost impossible to write about the subject without everything being overturned the next day. The approach taught me hard lessons and at the same time introduced me to tools I came to value not only for researching and writing, but above all for clarity of thought and for seeing how things connect.

And so to the continuously evolving subject itself. When examining such a dynamic system, it is easy to assume that its evolution always follows a comprehensively structured, wide-ranging plan and rests on the clear consensus of all involved. During the writing of this work, over a period of just under seven months, I saw first hand that even for the most informed actors this is by no means the reality.

A striking example that illustrates the discrepancy between rational planning and chaotic reality is the recent debate within the Ethereum Foundation. It centered on how the network should position itself in the future. While the Foundation wanted to hold to the ideological, almost romantic, cypherpunk ideals, some users, part of the community, and members of the team called for pragmatic, market-oriented adjustments in the face of stiff competition from other chains. The debate revealed that even in one of the networks regarded as the most technologically advanced, no automatic consensus exists on the path of further development. Progress is instead the result of painful friction, internal disputes over direction, and the constant struggle between idealism and pragmatism.

Alongside the debate itself, announced features and architectures changed, shifted, or were even dropped over the course of those months. The most consequential shift, also for the focus of this work, was the reorientation toward direct L1 scaling, initiated in February 2026. With this pivot, the research community, led by Vitalik Buterin, revised the strategy that had dominated for years: offloading scaling primarily to external Layer-2s. Instead, increasing the capacity of Layer 1 itself moved back into focus. Such an abrupt paradigm shift confirms the chosen division of this work. It shows that the “current state” can be precisely captured while the “target state” remains a dynamic construct that eludes rigidly predetermined roadmaps and realigns itself repeatedly in the consensus process.

The realignments stem in part from the uncertainties of developers, researchers, and other actors, who in part operate independently of the Ethereum Foundation’s focus and remit. They led to restructurings within the Foundation and beyond. At the same time they make clear that no fully defined picture of the future can exist when even the researchers themselves iterate monthly to annually. This does no damage to the work, and above all none to the network. I consider it entirely normal and appropriate, because Ethereum in particular must change with the times in the face of continuously growing technological possibilities and threats such as artificial intelligence, quantum computers, or advances in pure mathematics, and planning and research have to be adjusted accordingly.

To get a sense of the research community and the otherwise predominantly digital exchange, the work took me to various gatherings and events, specifically to Berlin Blockchain Week. There I was able, for the first time, to meet people who work on the project and in its orbit. Not that the trip changed my assessment. If anything, the reverse: the assessment, or rather the work and the understanding it built, made me curious to experience the otherwise purely digital exchange of ideas and people in person. I am grateful that this piece of writing opened up such experiences and insights and paid for the ticket to the conferences.

So much for the personal account and what I came to learn and experience over these seven months. What remains is the return to the preface and the account promised there of what I actually think.

When you analyse the technical infrastructure of Ethereum and then, as in Berlin, suddenly see it alive in front of you, the impulse is to radically widen your view. For this is about more than software.

At the moment Ethereum is still understood by the wider public mostly in pragmatic terms, as a technological alternative to our existing, centralized financial systems. I interpret the development, however, more fundamentally: in my view the blueprint of our reality brings forth a counter-pole at every pole, just as there is a below for every above, or a reaction for every action.

From this perspective Ethereum is no accidental invention. The structural template for a decentralized network lay ready in logical space, and Ethereum has occupied it. It is this polarity that explains why the common comparisons of the present underestimate the phenomenon.

The gap in pure payment is enormous, because the overwhelming share is settled via centralized fiat money and only a vanishingly small fraction via the entire decentralized sector. Since this work has already established that it is not about pure payment processing, a purely percentage-based comparison falls short. It merely contrasts the volume of decentralized payment settlement with the centralized equivalent, leaving what actually matters beside it unaddressed.

Even on the narrow field of pure balance transfer, Ethereum has occupied the counter-pole, even though that is the discipline in which it departs least from a classical payment system. The actual, unoccupied field lies where it was never about payment alone: in everything that people agree to with one another, bindingly, without knowing each other and without a higher authority to intervene in a dispute. This space cannot yet be expressed in percentages. The reason is that it has for the most part not yet been entered. What can be said is the smaller and at the same time decisive thing: the infrastructure that opens it exists. Whether and how quickly it fills is a question for regulation, habit, inventiveness, ease of use, and the circumstances under which people begin to trust an order without a center more than one with one.