Vitalik Buterin: Preserve Ethereum Blockchain’s ‚Minimalism‘

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned against ‘”overloading” Ethereum’s social consensus, which could bring “high systemic risks to the ecosystem.
• Several proposals have emerged suggesting the use of Ethereum social consensus for other purposes, including price and data oracles, re-staking initiatives, and using layer-1 soft forks to recover layer-2 projects.
• Buterin suggested potential solutions to address risks such as price oracles, either “not-quite-cryptoeconomic decentralized oracles” or validator-voting-based oracles that explicitly commit to their emergency recovery strategies being something other than a hard fork.

Vitalik Buterin’s Warning

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned against ‘”overloading” Ethereum’s social consensus – which, if discouraged or resisted – could bring “high systemic risks to the ecosystem.” He cautioned that while it is natural for application-layer projects to attempt such a strategy, it can easily become very misaligned with the goals of the community as a whole.

Proposals Seeking Other Purposes

Several proposals have emerged suggesting the use of Ethereum social consensus for other purposes, including price and data oracles, re-staking initiatives, and using layer-1 soft forks to recover layer-2 projects.

Potential Solutions

Buterin offered some potential solutions to address risks such as price oracles, either “not-quite-cryptoeconomic decentralized oracles” or validator-voting based oracles that explicitly commit to their emergency recovery strategies being something other than a hard fork.

Preserving Minimalism

The Ethereum cofounder also argued for preserving minimalism in the blockchain’s core development by avoiding overloading its consensus layer with additional functionalities. He added that blocking out certain changes in order to preserve this minimalism is „a reasonable tradeoff.“

Conclusion

In conclusion, Buterin discussed why he believes it is important for the preservation of long term stability on the network that all stakeholders come together and agree on maintaining order on the blockchain’s core development while adding features gradually instead of overloading its functionality at once.