Vitalik Buterin Proposes Making Ethereum as Simple as Bitcoin (BTC)
The Ethereum co-founder aims to make the layer-1 network as easy as Bitcoin to ensure long-term success, durability, and scalability.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes the network should strive to be as basic as Bitcoin while retaining its powerful features.
“One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is,” wrote Buterin in a May 3 blog post.
He continued that this simplicity has numerous advantages, which should be applied to Ethereum.
Simplifying Ethereum
The key benefits of simplifying Ethereum include making the protocol easier to comprehend, increasing involvement in development, and lowering the costs of developing new infrastructure and tools.
It also reduces long-term maintenance requirements, the likelihood of catastrophic defects, and the possibility of societal attacks and special interests.
He identified three significant areas for simplification: the consensus layer, the execution layer, and the sharing of components between protocol layers.
“The effort to revamp Ethereum’s consensus includes many opportunities to simplify consensus while also increasing efficiency and security.”
Implementing a ‘three-slot finality’ design to remove complex notions such as slots and epochs, decreasing active validators to enable simpler fork decision criteria, and utilising STARK-based aggregation to minimise trust problems are all examples of simplification.
“The EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] is increasingly growing in complexity, and much of that complexity has proven unnecessary,” Buterin stated of the Execution Layer.
He proposed replacing the complex EVM with RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture, or a simpler virtual machine. This might result in 100x performance gains, considerably simpler requirements, more developer options, and higher code size limitations.
“The third—and perhaps most underrated—way to reduce overall protocol complexity is to standardise across different parts of the stack as much as possible,” he stated. He added, “Ideally, there should be a single consistent approach to how we handle [a given function], whether in the consensus layer, execution layer, or elsewhere.”
Buterin determined that streamlining the protocol would be beneficial in the long run.
“Caring about simplicity is, like decentralisation, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately.”
ETH Price Outlook
Ethereum has fallen out of favour with cryptocurrency investors this year, with its market share falling to a record low of 7% in April.
Spot prices hovered just above $1,800 earlier this month but dropped below that level during early Asian trading on Monday morning. The asset remains in bear market territory, down 63% from its all-time high in 2021. In comparison, Bitcoin has declined by 13% since reaching its peak earlier this year
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