BRUSSELS — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave a keynote address on strengthening the Ethereum blockchain as a foundation layer to a packed room filled with approximately 1,100 participants at a developer conference in Brussels on Wednesday.
Buterin spoke at length during his presentation at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) about the strengths and weaknesses of the largest smart contract blockchain and its sprawling ecosystem, including his concerns about censoring transactions, as well as a proposal to increase the “quorum threshold.” from 75% to 80%.
Buterin said he believes the strengths of the Ethereum ecosystem are that it is a "large and fairly decentralized staking ecosystem" and that it is a highly international and intelligent community.
According to Buterin, the blockchain's weaknesses still need to be addressed, including the difficulty of individual staking, given that it takes 32 ETH to become a blockchain validator, and that running a node is technically difficult. He said both of these problems are “very solvable.”
The thought leader of the Ethereum community has made a number of technical improvements designed to correct various shortcomings that exist in Ethereum and which will "simplify the protocol."
“So if you want to create a robust ecosystem, it has to be simple,” Buterin told the crowd. “It shouldn’t have, like, 73 random hooks and some kind of backwards compatibility because of some random stupidity that this random guy called Vitalik came up with in 2014.”
Buterin also expressed concern about the 51% attack on the blockchain, saying that the collective assumption of the Ethereum community is that all Rally together will force minorities to soft fork and destroy the attacker.
“It depends on a lot of assumptions about coordination, ideology and other things, and it’s not clear how to do something like this in 10 years,” Buterin said.
ONE of Buterin's most specific proposals that he championed was based on the idea that recovery from chain attacks would become very difficult if the chain ended; Increasing the quorum threshold to 75-80% can help prevent this.
“I think it makes sense to really double down on those strengths and at the same time acknowledge and correct our shortcomings and make sure that we actually live up to our very high standards,” Buterin told the crowd.
