Original title: Vitalik Buterin Reflects On Strengths, Weaknesses of Ethereum, 'Hardening' the Blockchain
Original author: Margaux Nijkerk
Original source: CoinDesk
Compiled by: Mars Finance, MK
BRUSSELS — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delved into the topic of strengthening the ethereum blockchain as an infrastructure layer during his keynote address to a room packed with about 1,100 attendees at a developer conference in the city on Wednesday.
In his EthCC speech, Buterin discussed at length the pros and cons of the space’s largest smart contract blockchain and its massive ecosystem, including his concerns about transaction censorship and a proposal to increase the “quorum threshold” from 75% to 80%.
Buterin believes that the strength of the Ethereum ecosystem lies in its “large and highly decentralized staking ecosystem” and its international and knowledgeable community.
He also mentioned that some weaknesses of the blockchain need to be addressed, including the high threshold of 32 ETH required to become a validator and the technical complexity of running a node. He emphasized that these problems "all have solutions."
Ethereum’s leading figures introduced a series of technical improvements designed to address existing weaknesses in Ethereum, which will lead to “a simplification of the protocol.”
“So if you want to have a strong ecosystem, it should be simple,” Buterin told the audience. “It shouldn’t be bogged down by things like 73 random hooks and some kind of backward compatibility because some random stupid idea some guy named Vitalik came up with in 2014.”
Risk of 51% Attack
Buterin also expressed concerns about the possibility of a 51% attack on the blockchain, and suggested that the collective assumption of the Ethereum community is that everyone can unite to resist the minority and weaken the attacker through a soft fork.
“This involves a lot of assumptions about coordination, ideology, and various other factors, and it’s not clear how we’re going to deal with this in 10 years,” Buterin said.
One specific suggestion he made was that if the blockchain’s decisions were final, it would become extremely difficult to recover from an on-chain attack; therefore, increasing the quorum threshold from 75% to 80% could help prevent such situations from occurring.
“I think there’s value in leveraging our strengths, but also recognizing and addressing our weaknesses and making sure we’re actually meeting the high standards that we’ve set,” Buterin told the audience.
Buterin has been a regular at EthCC over the past few years. In 2023, he discussed the challenges of “abstraction” and the year before, he discussed pre-merged Ethereum.
