At the ETHBerlin conference, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin listed five blockchain architectures that he would like to change if possible. This is reported by DL News.
The developer noted that the ecosystem is becoming more popular, but it is still “misunderstood.”
After reminiscing about celebrating the launch of The Merge hard fork in Berlin, Buterin was asked what the programmer would change in the blockchain if he had to start all over again.
Too many bits
Buterin's first concern concerns the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). He explained that the technology's original design uses 256-bit processing instead of 64- or 32-bit.
The increased volume ensures high efficiency of checking large amounts of data, but is extremely ineffective for simple operations, since it greatly “inflates” the blockchain.
In the early days of Ethereum, optimization was not required, but as the number of users grew, the load on the blockchain became a problem.
Optimization
The Ethereum co-founder noted that early developers of the network should have focused on simplifying smart contracts.
With fewer lines of code, he said, “people would be able to properly see and check what's going on inside the protocols.”
Late PoS
The transition of Ethereum from the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm to Proof-of-Stake could have taken place much earlier, Buterin added.
According to Buterin, the transition replaced “raw and energy-intensive computing power” with economic incentives.
However, he admitted that he could have “saved a huge number of trees if there had been a better consensus algorithm in 2018.”
Log log
Ethereum is considered an open blockchain, where any transaction can be tracked.
However, as we moved from external wallets like MetaMask to Safe's account abstraction, some aspects of network logs began to get lost, Buterin noted. In particular, he emphasized the need to implement automatic journals of ETH transfers.
Introduced by Buterin on May 17 EIP-7708 makes just that change.
Another hash function
The Ethereum co-founder would also prefer to use the SHA-2 hash function on the blockchain instead of the current Keccak.
Even during the development of the network, there was a “hash competition” organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. During the competition, developers were asked to come up with an alternative to SHA-2, but most proposals were rejected.
As a result of the competition, Keccak won, which was later amended, essentially turning it into SHA-3.
However, the Ethereum team was already working with an early version of Keccak and was essentially using an iteration up to SHA-3, Buterin explained. Therefore, the developers had to create a special library to support both algorithms in EVM.
Despite some design mistakes, Buterin is confident in the future of the network and is convinced that there will be shortcomings in any project.
Previously, the co-founder of Ethereum supported the idea of X developer Wang Haofei about confidential likes and proposed moving the initiative to the Farcaster social network.
In May, Buterin called for the creation of a single interoperability solution for L2 networks.
He named MEV, liquid staking, and the cost of running a full node as the three main threats to blockchain decentralization.
Source: Cryptocurrency
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