Vitalik Buterin wants to simplify Ethereum (ETH).
In a new blog post, the Ethereum co-founder praises how “beautifully simple” Bitcoin (BTC) is, which he says is key to the crypto king serving as a “globally trusted base layer.”
“Historically, Ethereum has often not done this (sometimes because of my own decisions), and this has contributed to much of our excessive development expenditure, all kinds of security risk, and insularity of R&D (research and development) culture, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory.”
Buterin argues that simplicity can increase the number of people who can participate in protocol research and decrease the cost of creating new infrastructure. He also says simpler protocols have a reduced risk of catastrophic bugs and a smaller “social attack surface.”
The ETH co-founder outlines how Ethereum could come close to matching Bitcoin’s level of simplicity within five years, starting with the consensus layer.
“The new consensus layer effort (historically called the ‘beam chain’) aims to use all of our learnings in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK development, staking economics and other fields over the last ten years to create a long-term optimal consensus layer for Ethereum. This consensus layer is well-positioned to be much simpler than the status quo beacon chain.”
Buterin also wants to simplify Ethereum’s execution layer.
“The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is increasingly growing in complexity, and much of that complexity has proven unnecessary (in many cases my own fault): a 256-bit virtual machine that over-optimized for highly specific forms of cryptography that are today becoming less and less relevant, and precompiles that over-optimized for single use cases that are barely being used.
Attempting to address these present-day realities piecemeal will not work. It took a huge amount of effort to (only partially!) remove the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, for a relatively small gain. The recent EOF (EVM Object Format) debate shows the challenges of doing the same thing to the VM.
As an alternative, I recently proposed a more radical approach: instead of making medium-sized (but still disruptive) changes to the EVM for the sake of a 1.5x gain, perform a transition to a new and much better and simpler VM for the sake of a 100x gain.
Like the Merge, we have fewer points of disruptive change, but we make each one much more meaningful. Specifically, I suggested we replace the EVM with either RISC-V, or another VM that is the VM that Ethereum ZK-provers will be written in.”
At time of writing, Ethereum is trading for $1,803.
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