At the Ethereum Community Conference, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a keynote speech discussing the platform’s strengths and weaknesses. Buterin praised the Ethereum ecosystem for its size and reasonable decentralization, highlighting the diverse range of applications as evidence of its versatility.
Addressing the weaknesses, Buterin emphasized the need for simplicity within the network. He identified the network’s complexity as a significant barrier for non-experts and new users, advocating for a simplification of the protocol to make it more user-friendly for developers and users.
One of the critical issues Buterin touched on was the complexity of solo staking, noting the current requirement of possessing 32 ETH to become a validator and the complicated process involved in running a node. However, he reassured the audience that these issues are addressable.
Buterin also raised concerns about the potential for a 51% attack on the network, which could lead to network censorship. He admitted that finding a solution to such a threat involves complex assumptions about coordination and ideology, which are not straightforward to address. In response to this, he proposed increasing the quorum threshold from 75% to 80% to aid the network’s recovery from attacks.
Buterin’s proposal for addressing 51% attacks includes making the response as automated as possible. He suggested that if a validator or transaction is censored, it should counter-censor the majority chain, allowing all honest nodes to coordinate on the same minority software.
In terms of scalability, Buterin pointed to sharding as a solution, which involves dividing the workload among parallel chains. He assured continued research into improving and addressing security concerns within the ecosystem.
Concluding his speech, Buterin emphasized the importance of leveraging Ethereum’s strengths while continually addressing and resolving its weaknesses, ensuring the platform’s robust growth and development.
