Vitalik Buterin Proposes Making Ethereum Mirror Some of Bitcoin's Finest Points

Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the second-largest blockchain Ethereum and its frontman, has published a blog post where he proposes

Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the second-largest blockchain Ethereum and its frontman, has published a blog post where he proposes making several key modifications to the Ethereum Layer-1 chain to let it mirror some of Bitcoin's finest points. In this context, he revealed what he believes to be one of the best things about Bitcoin.

As Buterin notes, even a smart high school student is capable of fully wrapping their head around and understanding the Bitcoin protocol, and a programmer is capable of writing a client as a hobby project.

"One of the best things about Bitcoin is how simple it is," Buterin stated in his post. "This simplicity has lots of benefits. Let's bring those benefits to Ethereum."

[email protected]

One of the best things about Bitcoin is how simple it is. This simplicity has lots of benefits: it increases robustness (less code = fewer bugs), lowers maintenance costs (less code = less work to keep it running and upgrade it), and expands participation in protocol development (more people have the bandwidth to fully understand the protocol and contribute).

In essence, Buterin proposes simplifying Ethereum's Layer 1 to make it run with the simplicity and all the consequential benefits of Bitcoin. He wants to lower Ethereum's maintenance costs, minimize bugs on the blockchain and expand participation in protocol development. Buterin highlighted such Ethereum issues as EVM's 256-bit architecture and precompiles, calling them over-optimized for outdated use cases.

"The modularity of the system is lower, and the issues that arise are more complicated and take longer to resolve," Buterin stated.

suggesting that those issues could be resolved with a simpler architecture.

Buterin feels that in the short term, benefits of the changes proposed by him "do not appear immediately." However, "in the long term, it will be worth it." He suggested adding those modifications over the next five years.