Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin reflects on Ethereum’s strengths and weaknesses and ‘strengthening’ the blockchain
BRUSSELS – Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech on strengthening the Ethereum blockchain as a base layer to a packed house of about 1,100 attendees at a developer conference in Brussels on Wednesday.
Buterin spoke at length during his presentation at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) about the strengths and weaknesses of the world’s largest smart contract blockchain and its sprawling ecosystem, including concerns about transaction censorship and a proposal to raise the “quorum threshold” from 75% to 80%.
Buterin said he believes the strengths of the Ethereum ecosystem include that it is a “large and reasonably decentralized staking ecosystem” and that it is a highly international and intellectual community.
The blockchain’s weaknesses still need to be addressed, Buterin said, including the difficulty of solo staking given the 32 ETH requirement to become a blockchain validator, and the fact that running a node is technically complicated. He said both of these issues “are very addressable.”
The Ethereum community’s intellectual leader has outlined a series of technical improvements – intended to correct the various weaknesses that exist on Ethereum – that would allow a “simplification of the protocol.”
“So if you want a robust ecosystem, it has to be simple,” Buterin told the crowd. “It shouldn’t have these 73 random hooks and some kind of backwards compatibility because of some stupid random thing that this guy named Vitalik invented in 2014.”
Buterin also expressed concerns about a 51% attack on the blockchain, sharing that the collective assumption of the Ethereum community would be for everyone to come together, force a minority soft fork, and slash the attacker.
“It depends on a lot of assumptions around coordination, ideology, various other things, and it’s not really clear how you’re going to do something like this in 10 years,” Buterin said.
One of Buterin’s most concrete proposals that he advocated came from the idea that recovering from chain attacks becomes very difficult if that chain completes; increasing the quorum threshold to 75% to 80% could help prevent this.
“I think it’s important to really double down on those strengths, and at the same time, recognize and address our shortcomings and make sure that we’re actually living up to our very high standards,” Buterin told the crowd.