BlockBeats news, on May 3, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post stating that Ethereum's goal is to become a 'world ledger': a platform for storing civilizational assets and recording, serving as the foundational layer for finance, governance, high-value data certification, etc. This requires two points: scalability and resilience. The goal of this post is to focus on an extremely important but often underestimated aspect of resilience (which ultimately relates to scalability): the simplicity of the protocol. One of the best things about Bitcoin is its protocol design's extreme simplicity and elegance, maintaining the simplicity of the protocol helps Bitcoin or Ethereum become a trusted, neutral, and globally trusted infrastructure layer. In the past, Ethereum has often not done enough in this regard, and this article will discuss how Ethereum can become almost as simple as Bitcoin in the next five years.
Simplified consensus layer: The new consensus layer (originally named 'Beam Chain') aims to apply all the experience we have accumulated over the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK development, proof-of-stake economics, and other fields 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.
Simplified execution layer: The complexity of the EVM is increasing, much of which has proven to be unnecessary (in many cases my fault). It is suggested to replace the EVM with RISC-V or another virtual machine that can write Ethereum ZK provers.
It is recommended to learn from the approach of the tinygrad project to set a 'maximum lines of code target' for Ethereum's long-term technical specifications, aiming to make the critical code related to consensus in Ethereum as close to the simplicity of Bitcoin as possible. Code related to the handling of Ethereum's historical rules will still be retained but should avoid entering the critical consensus path. At the same time, we should also incorporate the following principles into our overall design philosophy: prioritize simpler solutions when possible, lean towards 'encapsulated complexity' rather than 'systemic complexity', and prioritize options with clear verifiable properties and guarantees in design decisions.
