Last month, a brother who does front-end development messaged me, sounding so wronged that he was about to cry. He said he had spent the entire weekend grinding through the t-43 documentation, just trying to run a simple application on the testnet. After two whole days of struggling, he got the Docker container running and proved that the server was up, but when it came time to write the contract, he was completely stumped and ended up kneeling in front of me!
It's not that I can't write code, folks! It's just that the seemingly simple business logic looks so complicated with the ZK circuits generated by the compiler that it makes me question life. In the end, all I could come up with were four words: I surrender! I've been pondering this for half a day, and the more I think about it, the more I want to bow down to the Midnight officials: Dad, please, give ordinary people a way out! The Midnight tech team boasts in the documentation: The Minokawa language is based on TypeScript, with millions of TS developers worldwide, and seamless migration is all it takes to start developing! Technically, this statement is correct; the syntax really does have that TS flavor—variables, functions, conditions—writing it feels no different from ordinary front-end code. But so what? In traditional front-end development, once the code is completed and the browser is refreshed, the effects are immediately visible, errors are clear, and debugging tools are incredibly handy. You can easily find a bunch of solutions by searching the community. But when it comes to Midnight's territory, after writing the contract code, the compiler generates a bunch of incomprehensible ZK circuits in the background, and if the generation fails, the error messages are all cryptographic jargon that has nothing to do with your business logic. You have no idea what's wrong, and even less idea on how to fix it; you can only kneel in front of your computer scratching your head!
This is like putting a veteran driver of a family car into a fighter jet cockpit after ten years, with buttons that look somewhat like a steering wheel. You expect him to fly? Don't be ridiculous, it's a miracle if he doesn't wet himself! @MidnightNetwork Dad, can we not make this so difficult for people! Later, I opened the developer forum and almost laughed to tears while feeling heartbroken. It turns out this situation is not an isolated case! A DeFi team posted lamenting: a contract that can be written in a day on Ethereum took three weeks to deploy successfully on $NIGHT the testnet! It's not that the logic is difficult, it's the time cost of debugging ZK circuits that can drive a person to baldness! Another independent developer cried out, after running the first contract locally, wanting to add a slightly more complex feature, the proof generation time skyrocketed from a few seconds to two minutes. Where is the performance bottleneck? I kneel and plead for Dad to give some hints; the child really can't figure it out!
Behind these complaints lies a heart-wrenching truth: Midnight's privacy protection is entirely exchanged for development difficulty! The more powerful ZK proofs are, the deeper the pitfalls of development. The white paper doesn't mention it, the promotional materials don't say it, but once you start writing code, you will definitely hit your head and bleed; you can only kneel and admit defeat! I broke it down for everyone: when developing on Ethereum, you only need to worry about business logic. Users send transactions, nodes execute, and results are on-chain; the linear process is super easy to understand. But when developing on Midnight, you have to do two things at once: write business logic while also proving that the logic has executed without exposing data. The complexity of the latter directly rubs the former into the ground, and ordinary developers simply can't handle it!
Take a simple auction contract for example; it's done in dozens of lines of code on Ethereum. But on Midnight? You have to kneel and ponder: how to protect bid information? How to selectively disclose the winning results? How to reject invalid bids without exposing the amount? Every privacy detail has to be written using ZK circuits. If you make a mistake in the circuit, the contract is directly void, and there's nowhere to cry! What's worse, this threshold directly skyrockets talent costs! Developers who can write Solidity earn about 20,000 a month; those who can write Minokawa and understand the underlying ZK circuits might not even be found for three times that salary! Developing applications on Midnight inherently incurs much higher labor costs than Ethereum. Who ultimately bears this cost? Isn't it the project parties and users? Dads, can we not spend so much money and effort?
I'm not saying Midnight's direction is wrong; on the contrary, I think its logic is completely right. Privacy protection cannot be separated from ZK, and ZK requires complex circuits, which in turn require high-threshold developers. I understand this technical cost! But there is a chasm between 'technologically impressive' and 'usable by ordinary people'. The child really can't cross it; I kneel and plead for Dad to build a bridge! How to walk this road? The child kneels and gives Dad a suggestion: hurry up and get the toolchain and encapsulation layer going!
Back in the day when the internet first emerged, building a homepage required understanding HTML, FTP, and servers. The threshold for individual webmasters was absurdly high. Later, with WordPress, ordinary people could build sites just by clicking a mouse. It's not that the internet became simpler; it's that complex things were all encapsulated at the bottom layer, and users didn't have to worry about it. Midnight is currently lacking this! Minokawa is friendlier than writing ZK circuits from scratch, but for most developers, you still need to understand the underlying layers to play. I kneel and plead for Dad to abstract another layer, encapsulating commonly used privacy functions into ready-made modules, allowing developers to focus on writing business logic without having to worry about how ZK circuits are generated. The child bows down to you! I also saw a response on the forum that was both funny and sad, where a brother spent two weeks getting his first contract to work, the function was incredibly simple, yet he was so excited, saying: 'This thing is so hard to use it makes me want to die, but I know what it does is right.' Humble yet persistent, just like me kneeling and pleading for Dad to give me a way out!
This scene is exactly like early Ethereum developers! In 2016, writing Solidity contracts meant dealing with incomplete tools, chaotic documentation, and vulnerabilities everywhere, all relying on faith to hold on. Later, DeFi and NFTs exploded. Midnight is now like ETH back then: tools are hard to use, documentation is poor, and developers are all exploring. But the child really can't hold on anymore! Furthermore, the frontend brother who previously gave up contacted me again a few days ago, having calmed down for a week and decided to try once more. This time, he didn't dare to make rash moves. He diligently kneeled and worked through the official basic tutorial from start to finish. On the night he got the first example to run, he sent me a screenshot saying 'proof generated successfully,' with the caption: 'This thing is torturous, but at that moment when it ran successfully, it felt so good I wanted to bow to the officials!'
BTC defines trust with computing power, Ethereum defines cooperation with smart contracts, and Midnight wants to define privacy boundaries with ZK. I understand this original intention! But from geek toys to mainstream tools, how can it not make people kneel? Midnight Dad, I kneel and plead for lower development thresholds! Kneel and plead for optimized error messages! Kneel and plead for encapsulating complex circuits.
