Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Protocol Development Should Introduce Clear Simplification and Garbage Collection Mechanisms

Odaily News Vitalik.eth posted on the X platform, stating that protocol simplicity is a crucial aspect of being trustless, passing the escape hatch test, and maintaining self-sovereignty. Even with a high degree of decentralization, if a protocol becomes bloated with hundreds of thousands of lines of code or complex cryptography, it will ultimately fail. Vitalik Buterin's concern regarding Ethereum protocol development is that excessively adding new features to meet specific demands can harm long-term self-sovereignty. To address the issue of protocol bloat over time caused by backward compatibility, the Ethereum development process needs clear simplification and garbage collection mechanisms. Simplification criteria include minimizing the number of code lines, avoiding unnecessary dependencies on complex technical components, and adding more invariants. Garbage collection can be implemented in a piecemeal or large-scale manner, such as replacing PoW with PoS, or downgrading low-frequency complex features to smart contract code through Rosetta-style backward compatibility. Vitalik Buterin hopes that the pace of Ethereum's changes will slow down in the long run and efforts will be made to prevent useless parts from becoming a permanent burden on the protocol.