Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder and chief architect of the project, made a surprise appearance at the last event held at ETHBerlin. His unexpected debut and candid reflections on Ethereum’s initial design attracted the attention of more than 600 developers.
Buterin’s speech not only brought back memories of Ethereum’s beginnings in 2014, but also offered insight into the future of the cryptocurrency, which is now worth $448 billion. This comes at a time when the US has approved a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has launched its own tokenized fund on the blockchain.
Despite Ethereum’s increasing mainstream penetration, Buterin noted that it is still often misunderstood. “The simple explanation is that Bitcoin is digital gold,” Buterin said. However, he argued that ETH does not have such a simple definition.
During his chat with ETHBerlin organizers Afri Schoedon and Franziska Heintel, Buterin talked about his memories in Berlin and his experiences with Ethereum co-founders Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke.
When Schoedon asked how he would rebuild Ethereum from scratch with his current knowledge and experience, Buterin first pointed out the problems with Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM). He explained that the original EVM design used 256-bit processing rather than the more efficient 64- or 32-bit. “The original design was too well suited for 256-bit,” Buterin told the audience.
Buterin also expressed his regret about the switch from Proof of Work consensus mechanism to Proof of Stake in 2022. He stated that he believed that a simpler version of Proof of Stake could have been implemented sooner, saving a significant amount of computing resources. “If we had a much simpler proof-of-stake in 2018, we could have saved a huge amount of trees,” Buterin said.
Buterin also said that now Ethereum would use SHA-2 for its encryption instead of the current encryption called Keccak.
*This is not investment advice.