A simplicidade do protocolo tem sido seriamente subestimada — Vitalik fala sobre os riscos de longo prazo do desenvolvimento do Ethereum

【区块律动】A Ethereum founder Vitalik recently posted an article delving into a frequently overlooked issue: protocol simplicity.

He pointed out that “trustlessness,” “passing the death test,” and “autonomy” are actually all built on a often neglected foundation — the simplicity of the protocol itself. Even if a protocol has a super decentralized design, with hundreds of thousands of nodes participating, supporting 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes performing full validation using quantum-safe peer da 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 — this protocol simply cannot pass those three key tests. It is neither truly trustless nor truly autonomous, and its security will be compromised.

This is Vitalik’s genuine concern about the Ethereum development process. He admits that perhaps there is 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, it can increase functionality; 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 overshadow deletions, and the protocol will become increasingly bloated like a blown-up 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 versions of 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” — exploring many ideas, observing which ones are truly effective, useful, or just dead ends. The current task is to prevent those useless things from permanently dragging down the Ethereum protocol.