Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum’s complexity threatens its 100-year future

Vitalik Buterin warns that Ethereum’s complexity threatens Ethereum’s centennial future, and suggests an approach that prioritizes simplicity over new features.

Vitalik Buterin has warned that Ethereum’s increasing complexity poses a risk to its 100-year future.

He also proposed a solution that requires an explicit garbage collection approach to protocol development, prioritizing simplicity over the introduction of new features.

Ethereum ‘Bloat’ is causing concern

In his latest messages shared On social media, the Ethereum co-founder discusses how excessive “bloat” undermines security, decentralization, and the network’s ability to remain “trustless.”

“An important and persistently underestimated aspect of ‘trustlessness’, ‘passing the walk away test’ and ‘self-sovereignty’ is the simplicity of the protocol,” he wrote.

His argument is based on the idea that even if Ethereum is highly decentralized and resilient, it can still fail if it is a mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and various types of complex cryptography. According to him, such a system passes the tests of trustlessness, defection and self-sovereignty because users have to rely on a small group of experts to explain how it works. New teams would struggle to match the same level of quality if current ones were to stop maintaining it, and if even experts can’t inspect and understand the protocol, users can’t truly own it.

Another problem is that Ethereum becomes less secure as it grows, because every part of the system carries the risk of breaking, especially if parts work together in complicated ways.

Buterin also discouraged developers from eagerly adding new features for specific needs. While he acknowledges that they can provide short-term functionality, he believes they ultimately harm long-term self-sovereignty and the goal of creating a decentralized system that will last a hundred years.

He also pointed out that the main issue is how Ethereum upgrades are assessed. When changes are measured by how big they are relative to the existing system, backward compatibility encourages developers to add more qualities than they remove, leading to bloat.

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Approach ‘waste collection’

The Ethereum co-founder proposed a solution that would turn the network development process into a “garbage collection” process. He described three measures of simplification, including reducing the total number of lines of code to fit on one page. Another is avoiding unnecessary dependencies on complex bits, such as multiple cryptographic systems, and adding more invariants that Ethereum can rely on, such as EIP-6780 limits on storage slot changes and EIP-7825 maximum charges for processing a transaction.

Buterin also believes that waste collection can be achieved in small steps, such as streamlining existing functions, or through large-scale changes such as moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. He also proposed a Rosetta-style backward compatibility method, where difficult but rarely used components remain available but are taken out of the mandatory protocol and implemented as smart contracts.