Original: DL News
Translated by: Asher, Odaily Planet Daily
Few would have expected Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to speak on stage at the ETHBerlin event last week. And, more surprisingly, to describe some of his regrets about Ethereum’s initial design. For many in the audience, his speech not only evoked the glory days of the Ethereum network’s birth in 2014, but also helped to chart the roadmap for what’s next for the cryptocurrency, now valued at $448 billion.
As for Ethereum today, the US SEC has just partially approved the spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF) - it has only passed 19 b-4 and currently needs to pass the S-1 document. BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, has also launched its own tokenized fund on the Ethereum network. The Ethereum network has spawned a huge ecosystem of developers and financial applications worth more than $63 billion, and it has become synonymous with decentralized finance.
V God: Rethinking the construction of Ethereum
Vitalik said there are a series of things he could have done differently, including developing the Ethereum virtual machine, smart contracts, and the PoS consensus mechanism. He also said that even though Ethereum is becoming more and more mainstream, it is still misunderstood. "The narrative of Bitcoin is simple, it is digital gold. But when it comes to Ethereum, it's like 'Wow, what is Ethereum?' "
ETHBerlin organizer Afri Schoeden asked: “Based on everything you know and have learned over the past 10 years, if you could start from scratch today, how would you build Ethereum differently?”
Vitalik discusses Ethereum’s past and present vision at ETHBerlin
Too many virtual machines
The first concern Vitalik mentioned: Ethereum’s virtual machine, which is the key to making the Ethereum network a decentralized large-scale cryptographic computer.
Vitalik said that Ethereum's original EVM design chose 256-bit processing instead of 64 or 32 bits. The original design was too complex for 256 bits, which is very inefficient and can generate a lot of redundant data on the blockchain even when performing simple tasks.
Smart contracts still need to be optimized
Regarding smart contracts, Vitalik said that early Ethereum developers should focus on making it easier to write smart contracts with fewer lines of code in order to increase transparency. This way, as the number of lines of code decreases, it will be easier for people to see and inspect what is going on inside them.
Switch to an “inferior” PoS as soon as possible
Regarding the transition of Ethereum's consensus mechanism, Vitalik said that Ethereum's switch from the PoW (Proof of Work) consensus mechanism to the PoS (Proof of Stake) mechanism in 2022 should have been done earlier. "When switching to PoS, we should have been willing to switch to a worse version of POS earlier, and ended up wasting a lot of cycles to really try to make PoS perfect. If there was a much simpler PoS proof in 2018, a lot of trees could have been saved."
Now, instead of miners running Ethereum, validators are in charge, who stake 32 ether (worth about $124,000) to do the same thing — and get rewarded for it. If they misbehave, such as validating fraudulent transactions, they are punished. In short, this switch replaces raw, energy-intensive computing power with economic incentives.
Automatically log to EIP
From large token transfers to backdoor traps, users can easily track the movement of funds in cryptocurrency, thanks in part to automated logging features.
However, as the industry has evolved, especially moving away from externally owned accounts like MetaMask to smart wallets like Safe, some aspects of this important logging have been lost. Vitalik said: "Automatic logging of Ethereum transfers should have existed from the beginning. It only took us 30 minutes to code it, but it became an EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)."
SHA-2 replaces Keccak
Vitalik said that if he had to choose again, he would use SHA-2 to encrypt Ethereum instead of the current Keccak encryption algorithm.
The early Ethereum team had implemented a non-standardized version of Keccak. Essentially, Ethereum was using a previous iteration of SHA-3, which meant that Ethereum developers needed a custom library—a collection of reusable code that didn’t need to be rewritten from scratch—to accommodate SHA-3 and Keccak. But due to incompatibility with other systems using SHA-3, the Ethereum network had to support both algorithms in the EVM.
In general, this problem has been basically solved and current development will definitely not be affected by it.
summary
Finally, despite a series of small design mistakes, Vitalik said that any project is bound to have such a situation. He said: "I am really happy that I feel that the Ethereum core developers and their execution capabilities seem to be getting better every year. The team is now able to effectively and safely correct some of these mistakes."
