BlockBeats News: On January 18, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted that an important yet long-overlooked aspect of "trustlessness," "passing the offboarding test," and "autonomy" is the simplicity of the protocol. Even if a protocol is highly decentralized, has hundreds of thousands of nodes, and is 49% Byzantine fault tolerant, with nodes using quantum-secure peerda and stark to fully verify everything, if the protocol is a clumsy and messy system composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of Ph.D.-level cryptography, then ultimately the protocol will fail all three tests: it will not be fully trustless, not fully autonomous, and not very secure.
One of my concerns regarding Ethereum protocol development is that we may be rushing to add new features to meet specific needs, even if those features bloat the protocol or introduce entirely new interaction components or complex cryptographic techniques as critical dependencies. While this may provide short-term functional improvements, it can significantly undermine the protocol's long-term autonomy. The core issue is that if protocol changes are measured by how much they alter the existing protocol, then adding features will always outnumber removing features in order to maintain backward compatibility, inevitably leading the protocol to become bloated over time. To address this problem, Ethereum's development process needs a clear "simplification"/"garbage collection" mechanism.
We hope that client developers no longer need to handle all the old versions of the Ethereum protocol. This can be left to older client versions running in Docker containers. Looking ahead, I hope the pace of change in Ethereum can slow down. I believe, for various reasons, this is ultimately inevitable. The first fifteen years should be viewed as a growth phase, during which we explored many ideas and observed which were effective, which were useful, and which were not. We should strive to prevent the ineffective parts from becoming a permanent burden on the Ethereum protocol.