Vitalik Buterin Wants to Make Ethereum as Simple as Bitcoin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling for a large simplification of the protocol, aiming to trim its complexity to a level person to Bitcoin’s portion preserving its unsocial strengths successful programmability and scalability.

In a blog post published Saturday, Buterin argued that Ethereum’s increasing method sprawl — from its statement mechanisms to its virtual instrumentality — has made it harder to maintain, audit, and onboard caller developers.

He projected a multi-year strategy to shrink Ethereum’s “consensus-critical” codebase and trim the hazard that the protocol becomes excessively technocratic and fragile.

“Even a astute precocious schoolhouse pupil is susceptible of afloat wrapping their caput astir and knowing the Bitcoin protocol,” Buterin wrote. “A programmer tin constitute a lawsuit arsenic a hobby project.”

High complexity

Ethereum’s basal furniture has go progressively analyzable owed to diagnostic additions, caller statement designs, and bequest codification requirements. While this has enabled almighty usage cases similar astute contracts and zero-knowledge proofs, it has besides accrued the hazard of bugs, made protocol upgrades harder, and raised the obstruction for caller developers.

In contrast, bitcoin’s halfway protocol remains comparatively unchanged and minimal: blocks, transactions, proof-of-work, and coin outputs.

Area of simplification projected by Buterin includes an overhaul of Ethereum’s existent statement furniture (the “beacon chain”), which involves analyzable mechanics similar epochs, slot shuffling, and sync committees.

Another is patching the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) incrementally, but yet replacing it wholly with a simpler virtual instrumentality similar RISC-V. This lightweight, unfastened modular could bring show boosts for zero-knowledge provers and drastically trim codification complexity.

However, 1 of the main challenges is preserving backwards compatibility with existing Ethereum applications.

Buterin outlined a phased attack wherever the existent EVM and the caller VM could tally side-by-side, and bequest functionality could beryllium moved into “non-consensus” layers.