Josh Stark — Ethereum’s Distinctive Property is Hardness (2021)
Stark argues that what makes Ethereum uniquely valuable — and therefore worth the inefficiencies of decentralization — is hardness: the property of being highly resistant to change, reversal, censorship, or attack. Hardness is not a bug but the core feature: it enables trust-minimized commitments that hold even without social or legal enforcement.
The essay distinguishes hardness from other possible coordination properties (speed, privacy, scalability) and argues that Ethereum’s design choices — PoW/PoS security, global consensus, smart contract finality — are best understood as investments in hardness rather than general-purpose efficiency. Applications that benefit from hardness are those where the parties cannot trust each other or cannot rely on institutional enforcement: cross-border transactions, censorship-resistant publishing, autonomous governance.
For OM: hardness is the technical correlate of “non-coercive coordination infrastructure.” Ethereum’s hardness is what makes it an adequate substrate for extitutional coordination — it holds commitments without requiring institutional authority or social trust, enabling coordination among parties who share no common institutional framework.