Vitalik Buterin has warned that the increasing complexity of Ethereum poses a risk to its 100-year future.
He has also proposed a solution that would require an explicit “garbage collection” approach to protocol development, prioritizing simplicity over the introduction of new features.
Ethereum ‘Bloat’ Raises Concerns
In his latest posts shared on social media, the Ethereum co-founder discusses how excessive “bloat” undermines the network’s security, decentralization, and its ability to remain “trustless.”
“An important, and perennially underrated, aspect of ‘trustlessness’, ‘passing the walkaway test’ and ‘self-sovereignty’ is protocol simplicity,” he wrote.
His argument is based on the idea that even if Ethereum is highly decentralized and resilient, it can still malfunction if it is a mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and several types of complex cryptography. According to him, such a system fails the tests of trustlessness, walkaway, and self-sovereignty, because users must rely on a small group of experts to explain how it works, new teams would struggle to match the same level of quality if the current ones stopped maintaining it, and if even experts cannot inspect and understand the protocol, users cannot truly own it.
Another problem is that Ethereum would become less secure as it grows, because each part of the system carries a risk of breaking, especially when parts interact in complicated ways.
Buterin also discouraged developers from being too eager to add new features for specific needs. Despite acknowledging that they can offer short-term functionality, he believes that they ultimately harm long-term self-sovereignty and the goal of creating a decentralized system that lasts for a hundred years.
He also pointed out that the main issue is how Ethereum upgrades are judged. When changes are measured by how big they are relative to the existing system, backward compatibility encourages developers to add more qualities than they remove, leading to bloat.
‘Garbage Collection’ Approach
The Ethereum co-founder suggested a solution that would make the network’s development process a “garbage collection” process. He described three metrics for simplification, including reducing the total lines of code to fit on a single page. Another is avoiding unnecessary dependencies on complex bits, such as multiple cryptographic systems, and adding more invariants that Ethereum can rely on, like EIP-6780 limits on storage slot changes and EIP-7825’s maximum cost for processing a transaction.
Buterin also believes that garbage collection can be achieved in small steps, like streamlining existing features, or through large-scale changes such as the switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. He also suggested a “Rosetta-style backwards compatibility” method where difficult but rarely used parts remain available but are moved out of the mandatory protocol and implemented as smart contracts.
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