Vitalik: The key to Ethereum's long-term sustainable development lies in protocol simplicity and the "garbage collection" mechanism

On January 18th, Ethereum founder Vitalik wrote, “An important aspect of ‘trustlessness,’ ‘passing the trustless test,’ and ‘autonomy,’ which has been underestimated for a long time, is protocol simplicity. Even if a protocol is super decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, with nodes using quantum-safe peer da and Stark to fully verify all content, if the protocol is a clumsy, chaotic mess composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five types of doctoral-level cryptographic forms, it ultimately will fail all three tests: it is not entirely trustless, not fully autonomous, and not very secure. One concern I have about Ethereum protocol development is that we may be too eager to add new features to meet specific needs, even if these features make the protocol bloated or introduce entirely new interactive components or complex cryptographic techniques as key dependencies. This might bring short-term functional improvements but will severely damage the protocol’s long-term autonomy. The core issue is that if we measure protocol changes by ‘how much they alter the existing protocol,’ then to maintain backward compatibility, new features will far outnumber deleted ones, and the protocol will inevitably become bloated over time. To address this, Ethereum’s development process needs a clear ‘simplification’/‘garbage collection’ mechanism. We want client developers no longer to have to handle all old versions of the Ethereum protocol. This can be left to old version clients running in Docker containers. In the long run, I hope Ethereum’s pace of change can slow down. I believe, for various reasons, this is ultimately inevitable. The first fifteen years should be seen as a growth phase where we explore many ideas and observe which are effective, useful, or ineffective. We should strive to prevent those useless parts from becoming a permanent burden on the Ethereum protocol.”