V God’s Warning: Ethereum Needs "Garbage Collection" as Protocol Complexity Threatens Its Long-Term Vitality

Vitalik Buterin recently published a profound reflection: no matter how powerful a blockchain is, if it is built upon hundreds of thousands of lines of code and complex cryptography into a “massive chaotic body,” it will ultimately fail all three key tests of trustlessness, decentralization, and self-sovereignty. This is not a technical detail issue but a strategic choice that affects Ethereum’s century-long vitality.

The Triple Dangers of Protocol Complexity

V神 points out that even if a protocol has hundreds of thousands of nodes, possesses 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and is fully verified through quantum-resistant cryptography, it still faces fatal flaws if the protocol itself is overly complex:

This means every part of the protocol could become a source of systemic risk, especially when these parts interact in complex ways.

Why Protocols Unavoidably Become Bloated

The core contradiction lies in the dilemma of backward compatibility. V神 admits that during Ethereum development, changes are often “additive” rather than “subtractive.” With each upgrade, for the sake of maintaining compatibility, new features are added while old features are rarely removed. As a result, the protocol inevitably becomes bloated over time.

This is precisely why, over the past decade, Ethereum has unconsciously sacrificed decentralization and privacy in pursuit of mainstream adoption and scalability. Running nodes becomes more difficult, data leaks become more severe, and block construction becomes more centralized—all side effects of accumulating protocol complexity.

The Solution: Clear “Garbage Collection” Mechanisms

V神 proposes that Ethereum development needs a clear “simplification” or “garbage collection” function, with three standards:

Three Core Standards

• Minimize code lines: Reduce overall protocol complexity
• Avoid unnecessary technical dependencies: Do not introduce fundamentally complex new components as key dependencies
• Increase invariants: Make core properties that the protocol relies on clearer. For example, EIP-6780 (removing selfdestruct) adds the property that “each block can only change N storage slots,” greatly simplifying client development

Two Types of Garbage Collection

Incremental Approach: Gradually simplify existing features to make them more streamlined and reasonable

Large-scale Garbage Collection: Completely replace outdated technologies, such as replacing PoW with PoS

Innovative Solution: Rosetta-style Backward Compatibility

V神 proposes a clever compromise—rather than completely removing complex features, downgrade them into smart contract code instead of making them mandatory parts of the protocol. This way, new client developers do not need to handle them.

Specific examples include:

• After upgrading to fully native account abstraction, all old transaction types can be phased out
• Replace existing precompiles with EVM or RISC-V code
• Ultimately change the virtual machine from EVM to RISC-V

This approach preserves backward compatibility while avoiding protocol bloat.

This is the “2026 Repair Plan” Core Content

Interestingly, this perspective on protocol simplification aligns with V神’s recent series of statements emphasizing that Ethereum needs to return to decentralization, privacy, and self-sovereignty. V神 explicitly states that 2026 will be a critical year for Ethereum to “regain lost ground,” no longer compromising core values for mainstream adoption.

Protocol simplification is the infrastructural foundation of this repair plan. Only when the protocol is sufficiently simple and easy to understand can Ethereum truly restore its original intent of trustlessness, decentralization, and self-sovereignty.

Summary

V神’s discourse touches on a long-ignored issue: protocol simplicity is a prerequisite for trustlessness, decentralization, and self-sovereignty. Pursuing short-term feature gains by continuously piling on complexity appears to meet various needs but, in reality, erodes Ethereum’s most core values.

This is not a quick fix, but it reflects a profound strategic shift Ethereum is undertaking—from “pursuing scale and adoption” back to “pursuing sovereignty and decentralization.” The process will be long, but it is necessary to build a “century-long decentralized superstructure that transcends empire and ideological rise and fall.”