Vitalik Channels His Inner Dostoevsky: “Let’s Make Ethereum Understandable Before the Sun Burns Out!”

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In the smoky, feverish light of innovation, Vitalik Buterin—pale, sharp-witted, looking like a philosopher cast adrift in a sea of blockchains—has clambered up onto Ethereum’s rickety soapbox, waving his arms and calling for a wild thing: simplicity. Once upon a time, he says, protocols were simple, like bread. Now, Ethereum is a cake with forty layers, and sometimes the candles set it on fire.

Protocol Simplicity: Utopian Dream or Poor Man’s Bitcoin?

On the third day of May, in a blog post as long as a Russian winter, Buterin rolled out his thoughts on “Simplifying the L1.” The man himself suffers deeply over the lost art of being simple, something everyone ignores until it bites you right on the backend. And who does he exalt? The humble blockchain of Bitcoin, beautiful in its basicness, untouched by the hands of too many cooks and cryptographers.

He mutters:

Even a smart high school student is capable of fully wrapping their head around and understanding the Bitcoin protocol. A programmer is capable of writing a client as a hobby project.

Vitalik dreams of a world where protocol simplicity is the soup that will nourish the masses—cutting costs, slashing bugs, and hopefully giving hackers less juicy targets. But the Ethereum bazaar is more complicated than a Moscow train schedule, and honesty compels him to admit that simplification will take blood, sweat, and possibly vodka shots.

Sometime in the next five years, Buterin claims, Ethereum could become as simple as Bitcoin. (And with a bit more luck, maybe he’ll also invent a toaster that doesn’t burn the bread.) One method? Redesigning the consensus layer, aiming for something called ‘3-slot finality’—which sounds like a revolutionary casino, but is actually rather dry and technical.

Buterin gets prickly about the Ethereum Virtual Machine, too, grumbling that it’s become as bloated as a bureaucrat’s resume. He floats the idea of replacing it with something minimal. Perhaps Ethereum will finally get its Marie Kondo moment: Does this opcode spark joy? No? Into the bin!

He confesses:

The biggest challenge with meaningfully simplifying (or even improving without complexifying) any part of the EVM is how to balance accomplishing the desired goals with preserving backwards compatibility for existing applications.

The third approach, naturally, is the one most everyone ignores—like cleaning behind the stove: use one standard everywhere! (Because, why have five different ways to sweep the floors when one will do?)

Vitalik, in a final flourish worthy of a tired but hopeful factory worker, suggests simplicity and decentralization are comrades in the same eternal struggle. And in blockchains, to be resilient is to be perpetually at war with your own complexity—maybe even your own developers.

How’s ETH Doing? 🤨

While Vitalik spins dreams of a beginner-friendly Ethereum, ETH investors stare at charts, wringing their hands and their wallets. Five months of 2025 have slid by, leaving only four puddles of red ink. Bleak? Maybe. Unexpected? Not for anyone who’s survived a Russian novel.

At the time of writing, Ether hovers around $1,817, slightly more depressed than your average winter morning in Nizhny Novgorod (a modest 1.6% drop in 24 hours). Still, to break the monotony, ETH has shown a spark of hope these past two weeks, jumping by almost 15%, like an enthusiast leaping into a frozen pond for questionable health gains.

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2025-05-04 21:47