TechFlow news — On January 18, Vitalik Buterin posted on X stating that protocol simplicity is a crucial aspect of trustlessness, passing the "exit test," and sovereignty. Even with high decentralization, a protocol will ultimately fail if bloated by hundreds of thousands of lines of code or complex cryptography. Vitalik expressed concern about Ethereum's protocol development: over-adding new features to meet specific needs could undermine long-term autonomy. To address bloat caused by backward compatibility over time, Ethereum's development process requires clear mechanisms for simplification and garbage collection. Simplification criteria include minimizing lines of code, avoiding dependencies on unnecessarily complex technical components, and introducing more invariants. Garbage collection can occur incrementally or in large-scale efforts—such as replacing PoW with PoS, or using Rosetta-style backward compatibility to demote infrequently used, complex functionalities into smart contract code. Vitalik hopes that, in the long run, Ethereum’s pace of change can slow down, striving to prevent obsolete parts from becoming a permanent burden on the protocol.
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