Overview
- Buterin warns that feature creep and reliance on advanced cryptography risk a “High Priest” dependence that weakens trustlessness and the walkaway test.
- He outlines simplification metrics focused on fewer lines of code, reduced cryptographic dependencies, and clearer invariants to ease client implementation.
- He proposes demoting little-used or intricate legacy functions from the base layer into smart contracts so new clients need not implement them.
- He cites prior cleanups, including the switch to proof-of-stake and gas cost reforms, as evidence that deliberate simplification can strengthen the protocol.
- He describes a slower change cadence for a maturing network, with ideas like isolating old EVM versions or moving to a simpler VM presented as proposals rather than enacted changes.