{"id":25201,"date":"2025-05-05T13:03:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T13:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=25201"},"modified":"2025-05-05T13:03:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T13:03:05","slug":"vitalik-buterin-wants-to-make-ethereum-as-simple-as-bitcoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=25201","title":{"rendered":"Vitalik Buterin Wants to Make Ethereum as Simple as Bitcoin"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling for a major simplification of the protocol, aiming to reduce its complexity to a level closer to Bitcoin\u2019s while preserving its unique strengths in programmability and scalability.<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/vitalik.eth.limo\/general\/2025\/05\/03\/simplel1.html\">blog post<\/a> published Saturday, Buterin argued that Ethereum\u2019s growing technical sprawl \u2014 from its consensus mechanisms to its virtual machine \u2014 has made it harder to maintain, audit, and onboard new developers.<\/p>\n<p>He proposed a multi-year strategy to shrink Ethereum\u2019s \u201cconsensus-critical\u201d codebase and reduce the risk that the protocol becomes too technocratic and fragile.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEven a smart high school student is capable of fully wrapping their head around and understanding the Bitcoin protocol,\u201d Buterin wrote. \u201cA programmer can write a client as a hobby project.\u201d<\/p>\n<h4>High complexity<\/h4>\n<p>Ethereum\u2019s base layer has become increasingly complex due to feature additions, new consensus designs, and legacy code requirements. While this has enabled powerful use cases like smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs, it has also increased the risk of bugs, made protocol upgrades harder, and raised the barrier for new developers.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast, bitcoin\u2019s core protocol remains relatively unchanged and minimal: blocks, transactions, proof-of-work, and coin outputs.<\/p>\n<p>Area of simplification proposed by Buterin includes an overhaul of Ethereum\u2019s current consensus layer (the \u201cbeacon chain\u201d), which involves complex mechanics like epochs, slot shuffling, and sync committees.<\/p>\n<p>Another is patching the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) incrementally, but eventually replacing it entirely with a simpler virtual machine like RISC-V. This lightweight, open standard could bring performance boosts for zero-knowledge provers and drastically reduce code complexity.<\/p>\n<p>However, one of the main challenges is preserving backwards compatibility with existing Ethereum applications.<\/p>\n<p>Buterin outlined a phased approach where the current EVM and the new VM could run side-by-side, and legacy functionality could be moved into \u201cnon-consensus\u201d layers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling for a major simplification of the protocol, aiming to reduce its complexity to a level closer to Bitcoin\u2019s while preserving its unique strengths in programmability and scalability. In a blog post published Saturday, Buterin argued that Ethereum\u2019s growing technical sprawl \u2014 from its consensus mechanisms to its virtual machine [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-25201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}