Vitalik describes some of his regrets about Ethereum’s initial design

PANews reported on May 30 that according to DL News, last week, at this year's ETHBerlin event, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described some of his regrets on the initial design of Ethereum. Vitalik said that he had a series of things he could have done differently. These things range from the development of the Ethereum virtual machine to smart contracts to the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. He also said that even though Ethereum is becoming more and more mainstream, it is still misunderstood.

ETHBerlin organizer Afri Schoeden asked: "Based on everything you know and have learned in the past 10 years, if you can start from scratch today, how would you build Ethereum differently?" Vitalik said that Ethereum's original EVM design chose 256-bit processing instead of 64 or 32 bits. The original design was too complicated for 256 bits, which is very inefficient and can generate a lot of redundant data on the blockchain even when performing simple tasks. In addition, Vitalik said that Ethereum's switch from the proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake in 2022 should have been done earlier, "We ended up wasting a lot of time trying to make proof-of-stake perfect. If we had a simpler proof-of-stake mechanism as early as 2018, we could have saved a lot of trees." Vitalik also mentioned: "The automatic log of Ethereum transfers should have existed from the beginning. It only took us 30 minutes to complete the coding, but it became an EIP." EIP-7708, submitted by Vitalik on May 17, will make this precise change. Vitalik also said that if he re-chooses, he will use SHA-2 to encrypt Ethereum instead of the encryption algorithm currently used called Keccak.

Despite a series of small design mistakes, Vitalik said that any project is bound to encounter such a situation. He said: "I am really happy. I feel that our core developers and their execution capabilities seem to be improving every year. We now have the ability to effectively and safely correct some of these errors."