Vitalik: Revisiting the "Cabin in the Mountains" Concept, ZK Technology Alters Blockchain Trade-off Logic

Odaily News Vitalik Buterin recently published an article stating that he no longer fully agrees with his 2017 viewpoint on blockchains "only recording transaction order, not committing to state," and explained the reasons for his change in perspective.

Vitalik pointed out that his early opposition to this concept was fundamentally because if the chain does not commit to state, ordinary users would either have to fully verify all transactions starting from the genesis block or be forced to trust a single third-party service provider, neither of which is ideal. In contrast, designs like Ethereum, which commit to a state root in the block header, allow for the verification of any state via Merkle proofs under the "honest majority" consensus assumption, making it more feasible.

He emphasized that what truly changes the trade-off is the development of zero-knowledge technologies like ZK-SNARKs, which make it possible to verify on-chain correctness without re-executing all transactions, thereby "achieving both security and scalability." Furthermore, Vitalik reflected on the uncertainties in the real world: network outages, service provider shutdowns, consensus centralization, censorship risks, and other situations can occur at any time. Therefore, a blockchain system must always retain a fallback option that is "self-verifiable without relying on others."

In his view, the "cabin in the mountains" is not a model for everyone to live in daily, but rather a safety net for extreme situations and an important bargaining chip for constraining intermediaries and service providers. Maintaining such a minimally viable, self-sufficient path is an indispensable part of Ethereum's long-term evolution.