The roads not taken

Key ideas

Buterin revisits early Ethereum design forks, asks where simpler choices might have served better, and frames many as tension between a simple chain and a capable platform.

1. 1

   Ask if your standard is too high

   Buterin questions whether Ethereum needed such a demanding proof of stake when a simpler one would still have beaten proof of work. He thinks starting with proof of stake would have been a mistake, but that switching to a simpler version in 2017 or even 2020 could have reduced environmental damage and freed researchers to work on scaling. He grants a better version would eventually have been needed, but says that work looks likely to happen regardless.

2. 2

   Cutting ambition can be the right move

   Buterin says sharding has steadily become less complex since 2014, ending in a design that looks close to a non-sharded chain. In his opinion that simplification was absolutely right, because the more sophisticated versions remain largely ideas and models while Danksharding is an almost implementable spec. He still gives ambitious research a role in pointing out directions and yielding simpler variants.

3. 3

   Refusing features usually held up

   Buterin looks back at features the team weighed for the EVM and judges that most decisions not to add more proved very good; an alarm opcode, for example, would be very hard to implement safely. State rent is his harder case: having it from day one might have made Ethereum more scalable but harder to build for, and the schemes available then were much worse than today's.

4. 4

   Check the assumptions behind a simplification

   Buterin admits the team rejected automatic logging of ETH transfers partly because it wrongly expected users to migrate quickly to smart contract wallets. He says auto-logging would have saved exchanges and others effort and bugs, and that keeping logs outside the protocol was an option never considered. He finds it very possible either path would have beaten what shipped, and says he would probably favor eventually removing the opcode.

5. 5

   Early allocation can starve later contributors

   Buterin reports two criticisms of the ETH distribution: the premine and the Foundation receiving the sale funds were not credibly neutral, and the premine over-rewarded very early contributors. He says the Foundation's holdings shrank quickly once it had to sell to survive. He sketches a voted dev fund as an alternative, answers whether it would have been better with only a maybe, and concedes critics might simply have complained about something else.

In Vitalik’s words

What’s available here

• Original source

  Linked. Opens on the publisher’s site.

• Player on this page

  Not applicable. Written piece; nothing to play.

• Full text or transcript

  Not reviewed. No license to show a text version here.

• Our summary

  Draft. Written by us with AI from the full public text and checked against it; quotes are word for word. Not yet rights-reviewed.

• Ask questions with AI

  Not reviewed. Off until there is licensed text to work from.