Tech
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 foundation 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 largest smart contract blockchain and its vast ecosystem, including his concerns about transaction censorship, as well as a proposal to increase the “quorum threshold” from 75% to 80%.
Buterin said he believes the strengths of the Ethereum ecosystem include the fact 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 validator for the blockchain, and the fact that running a node is technically complicated. He said both of these problems “are very solvable.”
The intellectual leader of the Ethereum community has explored a series of technical improvements aimed at addressing various weaknesses in Ethereum that would allow for 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, like, 73 random hooks and some kind of backwards compatibility because of some stupid random thing that this random guy named Vitalik invented in 2014.”
Buterin also expressed concern about a 51% attack on the blockchain, saying that the collective hypothesis of the Ethereum community would be for everyone to band together, force a minority soft fork, and hit the attacker hard.
“It depends on a lot of assumptions about coordination, ideology and other things, and it’s not clear how to do something like this even in 10 years,” Buterin said.
One of the more concrete proposals Buterin supported was that recovering from chain attacks becomes very difficult once the chain ends; raising the quorum threshold to 75-80% could help prevent this problem.
“I think it’s important to redouble our efforts on those strengths and, at the same time, acknowledge and correct our inadequacies and make sure that we really live up to our high standards,” Buterin told the crowd.