Vitalik Proposes Ethereum L1 Simplification, Aims for Protocol Simplicity Comparable to Bitcoin Within Five Years

BlockBeats News, May 3rd, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released a blog post stating that Ethereum's goal is to become the "world's computer": a platform for storing civilization assets and records, serving as the base layer for finance, governance, high-value data authentication, and more. This requires two main points: scalability and resilience. The aim of this post is to focus on resilience (which ultimately also relates to scalability), specifically on a crucial yet often underestimated aspect: protocol simplicity. One of Bitcoin's greatest strengths is its extremely elegant and concise protocol design. Maintaining protocol simplicity helps Bitcoin or Ethereum become a trusted, neutral, and globally trusted infrastructure layer. Historically, Ethereum has often fallen short in this area. This article will discuss how Ethereum can, in the next five years, become nearly as simple as Bitcoin.

Simplify the Consensus Layer: The new consensus layer (previously known as the "Beam Chain") aims to leverage all the experience accumulated over the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK development, proof-of-stake economics, and other areas to create a long-term optimal consensus layer for Ethereum. The advantage of this consensus layer is that it is much simpler than the existing beacon chain.

Simplify the Execution Layer: The complexity of the EVM continues to increase, with much of this complexity proven to be unnecessary (often my fault). It is proposed to replace the EVM with RISC-V or another virtual machine that can run Ethereum ZK provers.

It is recommended to follow the approach of the tinygrad project and set a "maximum code line target" for Ethereum's long-term technical specification, aiming to bring Ethereum's key consensus-related code as close as possible to the simplicity of Bitcoin. Code related to Ethereum's historical rule handling will be retained but should avoid entering the consensus critical path. Moreover, we should uphold the following principles in the overall design philosophy: prioritize simpler solutions whenever possible, favor "encapsulated complexity" over "systemic complexity," and prioritize solutions with clear verifiability and assurance in design decisions.