TechFlow news, according to DL News, last week at this year's ETH Berlin event, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described some of his regrets regarding Ethereum's initial design. Vitalik said there was a series of things he could have done differently, ranging from the development of the Ethereum Virtual Machine to smart contracts and the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. He also noted that even as Ethereum becomes increasingly mainstream, it remains widely misunderstood.
Vitalik stated that Ethereum's original EVM design opted for 256-bit processing instead of 64-bit or 32-bit, and the initial design for 256-bit was overly complex. The 256-bit architecture is highly inefficient and can generate large amounts of redundant data on the blockchain, even when performing simple tasks.
He said Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work consensus—how nodes in blockchains like Bitcoin agree on transaction data state—to proof-of-stake, planned for 2022, should have happened earlier. "When we moved to proof-of-stake, we should have adopted a slightly worse version of proof-of-stake earlier," he said. "We ended up wasting a lot of time trying to make proof-of-stake perfect."
Despite a series of minor design missteps, Vitalik said such issues are inevitable in any project. "I'm really happy—I feel our core developers and their execution capabilities seem to improve every year. We now have the ability to effectively and securely correct some of these mistakes," he said.
