Vitalik’s Plan: Can He Make Ethereum Less Confusing Than Assembling Ikea Furniture?

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In those mournful yet ever-hopeful steppes of blockchain progress, one voice—a slender, bespectacled engineer, not unfond of arcane blog posts—rose above the clamor. “Enough!” declared Vitalik, not to the terrors of war as in Russia’s yesteryears, but to the unending misery of complex protocols, where every developer labors as if sowing the field with stones.

Vitalik Buterin—architect of Ethereum, and perhaps one day a patient chess master—surveyed his own creation with a gaze equal parts pride and horror. “Why,” he pondered, beard metaphorically stroked, “must this Ethereum be as tangled as my hair after a windy walk along the Volga?” Inspired by Bitcoin’s sparse elegance, he issued an epistle called “Simplifying the L1.” Like Tolstoy sending Pierre Bezukhov into philosophical fits, Vitalik proposed to strip Ethereum of its extravagances, its node-sized Tolstoy novels, and bring forth—one day—a protocol even a babushka could love.

“Ethereum five years from now,” he mused, “could sparkle with the simplicity of Bitcoin.” Oh, reader, do not underestimate the heroism such an ambition requires in a world where technical committees roam, brandishing zero-knowledge proofs as if they were dusty volumes of Kant.

“Historically, Ethereum has often not done this (sometimes because of my own decisions), and this has contributed to much of our excessive development expenditure, all kinds of security risk, and insularity of R&D culture, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory.”

Shall We Find Redemption in “3-Slot Finality”? Or Only Existential Angst?

The first front in this campaign: Ethereum’s consensus layer, now so baroque that even Dostoyevsky would clutch his head. Vitalik dreams of “3-slot finality”—a plan to cast off epochs, banish sync committees, exile the endless parade of validator shuffling. Will it work? It can hardly be worse than the current situation, where choosing a fork is not unlike picking a winning side at Borodino (spoiler: everyone loses).

With fewer validators, Vitalik claims, “it becomes safer to use simpler implementations of the fork choice rule.” A glimmer of that elusive Russian optimism?

He also proposes mystical-sounding technologies like Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge (STARKs). If you, dear reader, understand these on first read, you deserve your own epic.

Down in the execution layer, Vitalik wishes to replace the intimidating Ethereum Virtual Machine with something called RISC-V—apparently minimalist, open source, and blessedly not requiring a PhD to pronounce. “100x performance improvements!” he cries, presumably with a raised glass of kvass. Yet, to spare the ghosts of contracts past, old EVM code will linger in a twilight, translated by RISC-V interpreters and grumbling about the good old days.

Protocol Standards: A Dream of Order in a Disordered World

What is simplicity, truly? For Vitalik, it is a single erasure coding method, a lone serialization format (SSZ, if you insist), one humble tree—where now there is a thicket. He proposes Ethereum maintain consensus code “as lean and auditable as possible,” no leaf unturned, no line uncounted. Perhaps he shall command the coders, like serfs in a commune: “Thou shalt not exceed the max line-of-code!”

Ancient features will be permitted to rattle around outside the core, telling tales of glory to anyone who dares listen.

Yet all these reforms emerge, if not from crisis, then from competitive dread. Ethereum’s fields, once lush and dominant, now suffer encroachment. At the LONGITUDE by CryptoMoon gathering, Alex Svanevik confessed: “If you’d asked me 3–4 years ago whether Ethereum would dominate crypto, I’d have said yes. But now, well… the winds have shifted.”

If only Tolstoy had lived to see it. Would he favor STARKs or side with the babushkas? 🪙🤦‍♂️

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2025-05-03 11:44