Why Vitalik Buterin Wants Ethereum to Be Less Like a Swiss Army Knife and More Like a Toaster

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Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin is looking at the Ethereum blockchain, seeing a hot mess, and basically asking: “Why aren’t we more like Bitcoin—the Marie Kondo of blockchains?” (Presumably, while folding his whitepaper into a little origami swan.)

On May 3rd, Vitalik went full tech Marie Kondo via blog post, suggesting maybe Ethereum could spark more joy—and less catastrophic protocol bugs—if it adopted a minimalist approach like Bitcoin. That’s right: he wants Ethereum to be less like the Cheesecake Factory menu and more like In-N-Out. Simple, efficient, and you won’t have to Google half the words just to participate.

Bitcoin: The “Please Don’t Overthink This” Blockchain 🤦‍♂️

Buterin compared Ethereum’s elaborate technical scaffold to flying a Boeing 747 to the grocery store. His take: If you need a PhD (or a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet) to understand a protocol, maybe it’s time to pull the emergency chute.

He’s also not thrilled that all this complexity lands too much power in the hands of “the cool math club,” a.k.a., the core technical team. You know, the kids who finished their calculus finals before you could find your pencil. Too much expertise in too few hands, he says, is a bad look for decentralization.

His five-year plan: Ditch the convoluted architecture. Borrow a page from Bitcoin’s “do less, but never crash” playbook. Worry less about being “fancy” and focus more on not melting anyone’s laptop.

“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,” Buterin explained, completely subtweeting anyone overcomplicating things since 2015.

Making Ethereum less confusing will allegedly save money, attract more developers, and maybe even give us all a chance to go outside for once. (Sunshine: nature’s decentralized vitamin D airdrop.)

His big philosophy: simplicity should be a sacred cow, right next to decentralization. All hail logic, clarity, and not reinventing the toaster every six months.

How to Marie Kondo the Blockchain: Vitalik’s Guide

So, how does one KonMari an entire global platform?

Step one: consensus layer glow-up. Time to streamline. He wants to drop validator headcount and fancy-pants finality systems, which allegedly means faster consensus and less “Did someone unplug the server?” moments.

He points out that Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers are barely Facebook friends. In other words, you can tinker with one and the other probably won’t show up at your house with a fruit basket.

“The nice thing about the consensus layer is that it is relatively disconnected from EVM execution, which means that there is a relatively wide latitude to continue to make these types of improvements,” Buterin said. Translation: These systems are basically on separate dating apps.

Step two: give the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) a makeover. Out with the ancient spell book, in with RISC-V—a clean, efficient architecture for the cool kids who still have free time. Picture a sporty electric car next to your dad’s pickup truck.

Forget arcane “precompiles”—Vitalik wants on-chain implementations you can actually follow on a whiteboard without developing hives. Next on his to-do list: build a RISC-V-based EVM interpreter, which promises fewer headaches for future upgrades and far more maintainable code (with only minimal weeping from developers).

Step three: stop reinventing the wheel… thirty-seven times. Let’s just pick the best erasure code, serialization format, and Merkle tree and actually use them everywhere, like the one hoodie you wear to every meeting.

“There is typically very little or no benefit to using different protocols to do the same thing in different places, but such patterns appear anyway, largely because different parts of protocol roadmapping don’t talk to each other,” Buterin pointed out. Or, as your mom says: ‘Do we really need six remotes for one TV?’

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2025-05-03 17:37