Vitalik Buterin Wants to Make Ethereum as “Beautifully Simple” as Bitcoin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants to drastically reduce the complexity of Ethereum, bringing it closer to what he called the “beautifully simple” Bitcoin protocol.

In a May 3 blog post, Buterin proposed a five-year plan to make Ethereum “close to as simple as Bitcoin,” which he said a smart high school student is capable of fully understanding.

This would involve replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V, a substantially simpler open-source programming language.

“The EVM is increasingly growing in complexity, and much of that complexity has proven unnecessary (in many cases, my own fault),” Buterin said. “Attempting to address these present-day realities piecemeal will not work.”

What they have now, he said, is “a 256-bit virtual machine that [is] over-optimized for highly specific forms of cryptography that are today becoming less and less relevant, and precompiles that are over-optimized for single use cases that are barely being used.”

It’s not the first call for simplicity. The Ethereum Foundation’s leadership recently unveiled a new, three-part roadmap with just three goals: Scale blobs, scale the Layer 1, and improve the user experience.

Buterin recently also called for a roadmap to dramatically increase privacy on the blockchain.

Switch EVM to RISC-V

Buterin argued that Ethereum’s base layer’s increasing complexity is due to the addition of new features, new consensus designs, and legacy code requirements.

“While this has enabled powerful use cases like smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs, it has also increased the risk of bugs, made protocol upgrades harder, and raised the barrier for new developers,” Buterin said.

Moving to RISC-V would bring a “radical improvement” in both efficiency and simplicity, provide more options for developers and remove the need for most precompiles, he added.

The biggest challenge to simplifying the EVM, Buterin warned, is how to do so while retaining backward compatibility for existing DApps. One solution he proposed is implementing an explicit limit to the line-of-code target.

Saying that “simplicity is in many ways similar to decentralization,” he said that this move towards a central goal of simplicity would require cultural change as “the benefits are often illegible, and the cost of extra effort and turning away some shiny features is felt immediately. However, as time goes on, the benefits become more and more evident.”