At the ETHBerlin event, the co-founder and lead developer of the Ethereum network shared some insights into his regrets about the creation of Ethereum.
In hindsight, Vitalik Buterin would have taken a different approach to the Ethereum roadmap.
One regret that particularly stood out was the delay in adopting a simpler version of Proof of Stake (PoS). He believes that implementing the PoS consensus mechanism earlier would have prevented Ethereum from being misunderstood, unlike Bitcoin, which is often referred to as digital gold.
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Additionally, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has launched its own tokenized fund on Ethereum’s blockchain. These developments are driving the growth of Ethereum as a token and network.
CoinMarketCap data shows that the market capitalization of Ethereum has surpassed $450 billion.
Despite Ethereum's growth, Vitalik Buterin believes it could have performed even better. He suggests that an early-stage PoS upgrade could have significantly benefited its development.
The reason is quite simple, Buterin said, “Bitcoin has a simple narrative, which is digital gold. But with Ethereum, it’s like, ‘Whoa, what the heck is Ethereum?’”
Apparently, Afri Schoedon and Franziska Heintel were the organizers of this year's ETHBerlin event.
Schoedon had asked Buterin an exciting question, saying, “With everything you know and everything you’ve learned over the last 10 years, how would you build Ethereum differently today if you could start from scratch?”
The Ethereum co-founder immediately pointed out many things, but his first reason was Ethereum’s Virtual Machine.
The original EVM design used 256-bit processing instead of 64—or 32-bit, and the Ethereum co-founder considers this a mistake.
He explained that “The original design was way too overfitted for 256-bit.” Moreover, the 256 bits were inefficient for most operations, creating bloat on the Blockchain.
Vitalik Buterin Ethereum Road Map Concerns
While stressing other issues, Buterin still circled back to the consensus mechanism of the Ethereum network.
In his opinion, early Ethereum developers' simplification of smart contracts would have made things much easier regarding Ethereum's identity. Moreover, it would have added transparency, as everyone could see and verify what was happening inside of them.
He said, “When we switched to Proof of Stake, we should have been willing to switch to a somewhat crappier version of Proof of Stake earlier on. We ended up wasting a lot of cycles on really trying to make Proof of Stake perfect.”
In 2022, Ethereum made the switch from PoW to PoS, replacing ETH miners with validators.
Vitalik Buterin expressed regret about the absence of automatic logging from the beginning.
Automatic logging would have allowed users to track significant transactions and backdoor token transfers. He mentioned that he and other Ethereum developers could have integrated this feature into Ethereum instead of creating it as an EIP.
“It should have been in there from the beginning. It could have been like 30 minutes of coding from myself, Gav, and Jeff. Instead, it’s an EIP,” he added.