Vitalik Buterin warns that crypto’s trajectory toward centralized decision-making is a threat to Ethereum’s resilience. He argues that Ethereum’s long-term goals—trustlessness, self-sovereignty, and resilience—can be undermined as the protocol grows larger and more technical. As the codebase expands, only a shrinking group of experts may fully understand the system, allowing trust to creep back into developers, auditors, or cryptography specialists. At that point, the network may be theoretically decentralized yet not truly so in practice.
Buterin calls this failing the “walkaway test.” If today’s client teams disappeared, could new developers rebuild Ethereum from scratch to the same safety and quality? As cryptography grows more exotic, that answer becomes less clear. Complexity also introduces security risks.
To counter this, he calls for a deliberate “garbage collection”—a process of simplification that reduces total lines of code, minimizes reliance on highly complex cryptography, and strengthens core invariants. Fewer moving parts make systems easier to reason about and harder to break. Ethereum has done similar work before, notably with the shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, a large-scale cleanup. Future changes, such as leaner consensus designs or moving complexity into smart contracts rather than the core protocol, could follow the same logic, and ultimately Ethereum may need to change less, not more.
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