On May 30th, during this year’s ETHBerlin event, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, discussed some of his regrets regarding the initial design of Ethereum. Vitalik mentioned that there were several things he could have done differently, ranging from the development of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to smart contracts and the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Despite Ethereum’s increasing mainstream adoption, Vitalik believes that it is still misunderstood.
Afri Schoeden, one of the organizers of ETHBerlin, asked Vitalik how he would build Ethereum differently today, based on everything he has learned over the past 10 years. Vitalik responded by stating that the initial design of Ethereum’s EVM chose 256 bits for processing, which he now considers to be overly complex and inefficient. Even simple tasks could generate a significant amount of redundant data on the blockchain with this design. In hindsight, Vitalik believes that a 64-bit or 32-bit architecture would have been a better choice.
Furthermore, Vitalik expressed that the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus mechanism should have happened earlier, ideally in 2022. He also mentioned that the automatic logging of Ethereum transactions should have been present from the beginning, as it would have only taken 30 minutes to code, instead of becoming an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP). In fact, Vitalik submitted EIP-7708 on May 17th to address this precise change.
Lastly, if given the chance to start over, Vitalik would have used the SHA-2 encryption algorithm for Ethereum instead of the current one, known as Keccak.