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Vitalik: The key to Ethereum's long-term sustainable development lies in protocol simplicity and a "garbage collection" mechanism
BlockBeats News, January 18th, Ethereum founder Vitalik posted, stating, "An important aspect of 'trustlessness,' 'escape-hatch-freeness,' and 'sovereignty,' which has long been underestimated, is the simplicity of the protocol. Even if a protocol is super decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, where nodes use quantum-secure peerda and stark to fully validate everything, but if the protocol is a clumsy mess composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of cryptic doctorate-level cryptography, ultimately the protocol will fail to pass all three tests: not fully trustless, not fully sovereign, and not very secure."
One concern I have about Ethereum protocol development is that we may be too eager to add new features to meet specific needs, even if these features make the protocol bloated, or introduce entirely new interactive components or complex cryptographic technologies as key dependencies. This may bring short-term feature upgrades, but it will severely compromise the protocol's long-term sovereignty. The core issue is that if we measure protocol changes based on "how much change to the existing protocol," then to maintain backward compatibility, adding functions will far outnumber removing functions, and the protocol will inevitably become bloated over time. To address this issue, Ethereum's development process needs a clear "simplify" / "garbage collection" mechanism.
We hope that client developers will no longer have to deal with all old versions of the Ethereum protocol. This can be left to older version clients running in Docker containers to handle. In the long run, I hope that Ethereum's pace of change will slow down. I think, for various reasons, this is ultimately inevitable. The initial fifteen years should be seen as a growth stage, where we explored many ideas and observed which ones were effective, which were useful, and which were not. We should strive to prevent those useless parts from becoming a permanent drag on the Ethereum protocol."
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