Vitalik Talks About the Five Regrets of Ethereum's Initial Design

At the Ethereum event held in Berlin, Vitalik Buterin unexpectedly delivered a speech about the regrets of Ethereum's initial design. This not only reminded the audience of the glorious moments when the Ethereum network was born in 2014, but also pointed the way for the future development of this cryptocurrency, which currently has a market value of $448 billion.

Recently, the U.S. SEC partially approved a spot Ethereum ETF, and the world's largest asset management company has also launched a tokenized fund on the Ethereum network. The Ethereum network has nurtured a vast ecosystem of developers and financial applications, with a total value exceeding $63 billion, becoming a representative of decentralized finance.

Vitalik stated that despite Ethereum becoming increasingly mainstream, there are still misunderstandings. He said: "The positioning of Bitcoin is very simple, it's digital gold. But when it comes to Ethereum, people often ask, 'What exactly is Ethereum?'"

When answering the question of how to rebuild Ethereum, Vitalik presented five main regrets:

1. Excessive Bit Width of Virtual Machine: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) uses 256-bit processing instead of the more common 64-bit or 32-bit. This design is overly complex and inefficient, potentially generating a large amount of redundant data on the blockchain even when executing simple tasks.

2. Smart contracts need optimization: Early developers should focus more on simplifying the writing process of smart contracts, reducing the number of lines of code to improve transparency. This will make it easier for people to view and inspect the internal conditions of the contract.

3. The PoS transition should have been done earlier: Vitalik believes that Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) should have been completed sooner. He stated: "We should have adopted a less perfect version of PoS earlier, rather than spending a lot of time trying to perfect it. If a simpler PoS had been adopted in 2018, it could have saved a lot of resources."

4. Missing Automatic Logging Feature: Vitalik pointed out that the automatic logging feature for Ethereum transfers should have been present from the very beginning. This feature is crucial for tracking the flow of funds in cryptocurrency, but as the industry has developed, particularly with the rise of smart wallets, some logging functions have been lost.

5. Cryptographic Algorithm Selection: Vitalik stated that if he could choose again, he would use SHA-2 instead of Keccak as the cryptographic algorithm for Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum uses an earlier iteration of SHA-3, which has led to compatibility issues with other systems that use SHA-3.

Despite these design flaws, Vitalik remains optimistic about the development of Ethereum. He stated: "I am glad to see that the execution capabilities of the Ethereum core development team are improving every year. The current team has the ability to effectively and safely correct these early mistakes."