Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain discussed the dangers of overwhelming the blockchain’s consensus.
According to a blog post by Buterin from May 21, the ultimate oracle, re-staking, and L1-driven recovery of L2 projects technologies, among other things, would pose significant systemic dangers to the ecosystem and should be discouraged and opposed.
Buterin insisted that application-layer projects should avoid acts that could expand the “Scope” of blockchain consensus beyond validating the fundamental principles of the Ethereum protocol and should maintain the chain’s simplicity.
Ethereum consensus is the process whereby blocks are validated by the proof-of-stake mechanism implemented in September 2022 with “the Merge.”
He acknowledged that blockchain communities’ social consensus is a shaky concept and that 51% of attacks and bugs might always occur.
“But because it has such a high risk of causing chain splits, in mature communities it should be used sparingly.”
Although it is common for application-layer initiatives to add more functionality to the blockchain’s core, these actions have no set limits and may easily lead to a blockchain community having more and more “mandates” over time.
This would force the community to choose between a high likelihood of a chain split each year and some sort of de facto-structured bureaucracy that ultimately controls the chain.
We should instead preserve the chain’s minimalism, support uses of re-staking that do not look like slippery slopes to extend the role of Ethereum consensus, and help developers find alternate strategies to achieve their security goals.
That said, the Nimbus Ethereum client released a v23.5.1 update over the weekend to allow incremental pruning and enhance network compatibility.
Ethereum Client Launch Pruning Update
Recent finality concerns on the Ethereum blockchain were caused by the absence of comprehensive pruning techniques.
Pruning, to put it briefly, is the process of deleting older data to free up disk space. The Eth network faced finality issues twice in a 24-hour period on May 11 and 12. Critical updates were provided by Ethereum clients to stop Beacon Chain nodes from using a lot of resources during tumultuous times.
In 2022, Vitalik Buterin added pruning to the Ethereum Roadmap for scalability, decentralization, and simple node operation. Nodes don’t need to store a lot of data or discard older data in order to persist. Clients can also get rid of code that handles historical blocks by pruning the history.