Vitalik: Ethereum Consensus Overload Will Bring High Risk To Ecosystem

The Ethereum founder said in the article that over the years, developers/projects have had many ideas to use Ethereum’s consensus for other purposes (usually in the beta phase), such as the last prophecy, recommit, and resurrecting L2 projects based on L1.

The purpose of this post will be to explain in detail the argument why a specific subset of these techniques brings high systemic risks to the ecosystem and should be discouraged and resisted.

The report concludes that the social consensus of the blockchain community is fragile and should be used with caution in mature communities. Some developers try to extend the core of the blockchain with more and more functionality, but each such extension makes the core more vulnerable. We should be wary of actions taken by application layer projects that could increase the “scope” of blockchain consensus rather than validate Ethereum’s core protocol rules.

Such an idea is often conceived without considering the risks, but its results can easily contradict the goals of the entire community. Such a process has no limiting principle and could easily lead to a blockchain community having more and more “mandates” over time, pushing it into an uncomfortable choice between a high yearly risk of splitting and some kind of de-facto formalized bureaucracy that has ultimate control of the chain.

Instead, we should maintain chain minimalism and help developers find alternative strategies to achieve their security goals.

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