Overview
- Buterin warns that rising protocol complexity forces reliance on a small circle of experts, undermining trustlessness and the walkaway test.
- He argues that strong backward-compatibility pressures create lasting feature creep that expands risk and maintenance burdens.
- His plan emphasizes minimizing total code, reducing cryptographic dependencies, and adding clear invariants to simplify client implementation.
- He proposes moving rarely used functions out of the mandatory core into smart contracts, including retiring old transaction types via account abstraction.
- Citing prior cleanups like the transition to proof-of-stake and gas-cost reforms, he urges a slower pace of base-layer change as Ethereum matures, with no removals enacted yet.