In this tweet, Vitalik Buterin is redefining what “trustlessness” means in the context of blockchain. The Ethereum co-founder claims that the protocol has to be simpler.
Striving for simplicity
In crypto, the mantra is “Don’t trust, verify.” You shouldn’t trust a bank or a government; you should trust the code.
However, Buterin is pointing out a flaw in this logic: If the code is too complex for a single human to understand, you are not actually verifying it. Instead, you are forced to trust the small handful of genius developers or auditors who claim to understand it.
Ethereum has become so massive and complex that very few people understand the entire protocol from “top to bottom”.
When knowledge is concentrated in a few people because the system is too hard to learn, it creates a centralization risk. It creates an upper class of developers that everyone else must blindly follow.
Buterin argues that for a network to be truly decentralized, the barrier to entry for understanding it must be low.
If the protocol is simple, more people can audit the code, find bugs, and propose improvements.
Buterin supports following the lead of tinygrad, a deep learning framework famous for trying to keep its codebase under a strict line limit. The philosophy is that constraint breeds clarity.
He wants the protocol to be lean enough that a single competent person can hold the entire mental model in their head at once.