The simplicity of the protocol has been seriously underestimated — Vitalik discusses the long-term risks of Ethereum's development

【Blockchain Rhythm】Ethereum founder Vitalik recently published an article delving into a frequently overlooked issue: protocol simplicity.

He pointed out that key features such as “trustless,” “byzantine fault tolerance,” and “autonomy” are actually built upon a often neglected foundation—the simplicity of the protocol itself. Even if a protocol has a highly decentralized design, with hundreds of thousands of nodes participating, supporting 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes performing fully verified operations using quantum-safe peerda and stark technologies, if the protocol is a complex monster composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five types of doctoral-level cryptographic formalizations, the end result is that—the protocol simply cannot pass those three key tests. It is neither truly trustless nor genuinely autonomous, and its security will be compromised.

This is a real concern Vitalik has about the Ethereum development process. He admits that there is currently too much haste to add new features to the protocol, even if these features make the protocol bulky or introduce entirely new interaction modules or complex cryptographic technologies as core dependencies. In the short term, this can increase functionality, but in the long term, it erodes the protocol’s autonomy.

What is the key issue? If the bigger the change, the more worthwhile it is, then to maintain backward compatibility, new features will always outweigh deleted ones, and the protocol will become increasingly bloated like a balloon. Vitalik’s suggestion is that Ethereum’s development process needs to introduce a clear “simplification” and “garbage collection” mechanism.

He hopes to see a transformation—client developers no longer need to support all historical versions of the Ethereum protocol, which can be handled by old version clients running in Docker containers. From a longer-term perspective, Vitalik believes that the pace of Ethereum’s evolution should gradually slow down, which is an inevitable trend in the future.

He views Ethereum’s first fifteen years as a “growth phase”—we explored many ideas, observed which ones were truly effective, useful, or simply dead ends. The current task is to prevent those useless things from permanently dragging down the Ethereum protocol.