Vitalik Buterin Proposes Making Ethereum as Simple as Bitcoin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes the network should aim to become as simple as Bitcoin while maintaining its advanced capabilities.

“One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is,” said Buterin in a blog post on May 3.

This simplicity has lots of benefits, and they should be brought to Ethereum, he added.

Simplifying Ethereum

Key benefits of simplifying Ethereum include making the protocol easier to understand, increasing participation in development, and reducing the costs of creating new infrastructure and tools.

It also lowers long-term maintenance requirements, minimizes the risk of catastrophic bugs, and reduces the potential for social attacks and special interests.

There are three major areas of simplification: Consensus Layer, Execution Layer, and sharing components across protocol layers, he said.

“The effort to revamp Ethereum’s consensus includes many opportunities to simplify consensus, while also increasing efficiency and security.”

Simplification could include implementing a ‘three-slot finality’ design to remove complex concepts like slots and epochs, reducing active validators to enable simpler fork choice rules, and using STARK-based aggregation to eliminate trust concerns.

“The EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] is increasingly growing in complexity, and much of that complexity has proven unnecessary,” Buterin said regarding the Execution Layer.

He suggested replacing the complex EVM with RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture, or another simpler virtual machine. This could provide 100x performance improvements, much simpler specifications, better developer options, and increased code size limits.

“The third and most easily underrated way to reduce total protocol complexity is to share one standard across different parts of the stack as much as possible,” he said, before adding, “There should ideally only be one way we do [something], across the consensus, execution, and other layers.”

Buterin concluded that simplifying the protocol would be worthwhile in the long run.

“Caring about simplicity is, like decentralization, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately.”

ETH Price Outlook

Ethereum has fallen out of favor among crypto investors this year, with its market share collapsing to an all-time low of 7% in April.

Spot prices have been hovering just above $1,800 so far this month, but dipped below it in early trading in Asia on Monday morning.

The asset remains at bear market levels, down 63% from its 2021 all-time high, whereas Bitcoin is 13% down from its peak price earlier this year.

Nevertheless, analysts remain confident that ETH can recover this year with a new roadmap and approaching upgrades.