Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, responded to these blockchain criticisms in a detailed blog post, analyzing three core issues related to Ethereum centralization: MEV (extractable value miner maximum), liquidity staking, and hardware costs to operate an individual node.
Buterin noted that concerns surrounding Ethereum’s design in these three important areas “are widely shared,” adding, “These are concerns that I have personally encountered many times.” However, Buterin said, these problems may not be as difficult to fix as some people assume.
In his post, published on May 17, Buterin first addressed the issue of MEV, or the financial returns that node operators can gain by rearranging transactions in a block . Buterin describes two approaches to MEV as “mitigation” (reducing MEV through smart protocol design, such as CowSwap) and “isolation” (attempting to reduce or eliminate MEV entirely through terms in the protocol).
While MEV isolation seems an attractive option, Buterin notes that this scenario comes with some concentration risks. “If builders had the power to completely remove transactions from a block, attacks could easily occur,” Buterin noted. However, Buterin advocates that builders are working on MEV isolation through concepts like transaction inclusion lists, which “take away the builder's ability to push transactions out of the block entirely.” .”
“I think ideas in this direction – really pushing the smallest possible isolation box – are very interesting, and I support moving in that direction,” Buterin concluded.
Liquidity Staking and Node Operations
Buterin also mentioned the relatively low number of individual Ethereum stakers, as most stakers choose to stake with a staking provider, whether a centralized service like Coinbase or a decentralized service like Lido or RocketPool, due to the complexity, hardware, and minimum 32 ETH required to operate an individual Ethereum node.
While Buterin acknowledged advances are being made to reduce the cost and complexity around operating an individual node, he also noted that “again, there are many things we can do,” possibly through reducing the time to withdraw staked ETH or reducing the minimum requirement of 32 ETH to become an individual staker.
“Incorrect answers could lead Ethereum down the path of centralization and ‘reinventing the traditional financial system with additional steps’; The correct answers could create a shining example of a successful ecosystem with a large and diverse set of individual stakers and highly decentralized staking pools,” Buterin wrote.
The problem of high hardware requirements for nodes appears to be more difficult for Buterin, although he admits that with the Verkle Tree and the upcoming EIP-4444*, “a node's hardware requirements could reasonably fall below a hundred gigabytes, and could be close to zero if we completely remove the responsibility for historical storage (possibly only for non-staking nodes).”
Buterin concluded his article by calling on the Ethereum ecosystem to tackle difficult questions instead of avoiding them. “…We should have a deep respect for the properties that make Ethereum unique, and continue to work to maintain and improve those properties as Ethereum scales,” Buterin wrote.
Buterin added on May 18, in a post on X, that he was happy to see democratic debate among community members. “I'm very proud that Ethereum doesn't have any culture that tries to discourage people from expressing their views, even if they have very negative feelings towards big things in the protocol or the ecosystem. Some people wave the flag of ‘open dialogue’ like a flag, some take it seriously,” Buterin wrote.
*The Verkle Tree is an innovative cryptographic data structure for Ethereum that enhances performance and scalability. Compared to the current Merkle Patricia Tree, the Verkle Tree has the following advantages:
More efficient: Reduce the size of the evidence needed to verify data.
Better compression: Helps reduce blockchain size.
Scale better: Process more transactions and data without consuming as many resources.
*EIP-4444 is a proposal to reduce storage requirements for Ethereum nodes. Key points include:
Prune historical data: Stop serving historical status data older than one year.
Synchronize with snapshots: Makes it easy for new nodes to synchronize with the current state of the network.
Incentivize historical data storage: Create an incentive mechanism for nodes to store and serve historical data.
Source: https://tapchibitcoin.io/vitalik-buterin-dua-ra-giai-phap-giai-quyet-cac-moi-de-doa-doi-voi-su-phan-quyen-cua-ethereum.html
