Vitalik: The key to Ethereum's long-term sustainable development lies in protocol simplicity and a "garbage collection" mechanism

**On January 18, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin highlighted a long-underestimated pillar of "trustlessness," "escape-hatch-freeness," and "sovereignty": protocol simplicity.** In his post, he argued that even a protocol with hundreds of thousands of nodes, 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, quantum-secure peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and STARK full validation would fail all three tests if it’s a clunky mess—loaded with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of cryptic doctorate-level cryptography. Such complexity would leave it neither fully trustless, sovereign, nor secure. One concern surrounding Ethereum’s development is that teams may be too eager to add new features to meet immediate needs, even if those additions bloat the protocol, introduce new interactive components, or rely on complex cryptographic technologies. While this delivers short-term upgrades, it risks compromising the protocol’s long-term sovereignty. The core issue: backward compatibility means new functions are added far more often than removed, leading to inevitable bloat over time. To fix this, Ethereum’s development process needs a clear "simplify" or "garbage collection" mechanism. Hopes for the future include: client developers no longer having to support all old Ethereum protocol versions (letting legacy clients run in Docker containers handle that); and a long-term slowdown in Ethereum’s change pace (seen as inevitable by the author). The first 15 years, per the author, should be viewed as a growth phase—exploring ideas, identifying what works, what’s useful, and what’s not. The goal is to prevent useless components from becoming a permanent drag on the protocol.