Vitalik Explores Ethereum’s Strengths and Weaknesses at ETHCC

• Ethereum’s co-founder explained some of Ethereum’s issues at the EthCC.
• He also proposed solutions to these problems, like simplifying protocol and making solo staking easier.

At the Ethereum Community Conference, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency, Vitalik Buterin, gave a keynote speech regarding its strengths and weaknesses. He began by highlighting the strength of the Ethereum ecosystem, describing it as “large and reasonably decentralised”, and highlighting the range of these applications that shows Ethereum’s versatility.

Buterin mentioned that Ethereum’s weaknesses still need to be addressed. The co-founder is known for openly discussing the cryptocurrency’s weaknesses despite its numerous successes.

Among the more prominent weaknesses is Ethereum’s usability, which renders the network incredibly complicated for non-experts and discouraging for new users. He pushed for simplifying the existing protocol to ease things for developers and users alike.

Furthermore, Buterin noted that solo staking is still very difficult as the current process requires 32 ETH before one can become a validator in addition to the complicated process of running a node. However, he reassured the crowd that these issues are “very addressable”.

He also advocated for preparedness in the hypothetical case of a 51% attack and stated that his biggest concern is that it could result in network censorship. He admitted that developing a solution for this is not as simple as it “depends on a lot of assumptions around coordination, ideology, and various other things, and it’s not clear how to do something like that as well in 10 years.”

However, he proposed that increasing the quorum threshold from 75% to 80% can help prevent difficulties in the network recovering from attacks when the chain finalises.

“We want to make the response to 51% attacks be as automated as possible,” Buterin stated. Essentially, if a validator or transaction is censored, it will counter-censor the majority chain, and all honest nodes will coordinate on the same minority software.

Vitalik Buterin presented an honest and unbiased representation of Ethereum’s current state while proferring solutions to certain issues through various technological innovations.

For example, to address Ethereum’s scalability issues, Vitalik stated that a solution lies in shards, which will allow for the division of workload among parallel chains. He also stated that continuous research will be conducted to improve and address security concerns.

To round up his speech, he stressed the value of doubling down on strengths while still recognising and fixing any inadequacies.