V God's speech summary at ETH CC: Ethereum Merge is just the beginning, the next step will be Surge

Fashion guru Vitalik brought his new handbag to the fashion capital of Paris to attend ETH CC and give a speech.

Vitalik Buterin said that Bitcoin supporters believe that Bitcoin has completed 80%, but Ethereum supporters believe that Ethereum has only completed 40%. After the merger is expected to be completed in September this year, Ethereum will still only complete about 55%.

Merge is just a small step in the development of Ethereum . There will be Surge, Verge, purge and splurge later. In short, Ethereum is still in its early stages and has not yet released all its big moves.

The following is a PPT summary of Vitalik’s speech, with pictures from Biconomy CTO:

Merge is not the final destination of Ethereum. The development path is:

Merge => Surge => Verge

Merge is about transferring from POW to POS;

Surge is about introducing sharding;

Verge is all about Verkle trees to help optimize storage on Ethereum and help reduce node size.

We are at a stage where Ethereum’s capabilities are being made more powerful through rapid changes to the protocol.

But eventually we’ll stop making rapid changes to the protocol and leverage systems like L2 to add more functionality to the Ethereum ecosystem.

L1 is for safety and reliability, and L2 is for fast iteration and execution.

Escape velocity theory : Once L1 is strong enough, L2 can do the rest.

Developers need breaks, and new features need time to be ironed out and de-risked. (So, that's why progress is slow?)

We need short-term pain and long-term gain

SELFSESTRUCT

EIP-4444 : Clients must stop providing historical headers, bodies, and receipts older than one year at the p2p layer.

Switch to Verkle trees (store more data in less space)

This may mean no backward compatibility.

These are what Vitalik is afraid to do:

• Add support for multiple virtual machines, increasing the complexity of consensus;

• Solve base layer SNARKS instead of waiting for better circuit design;

• Make Ethereum so complex that only developers can understand its design.

Where should the focus be?

• Easy-to-use light clients, so anyone can run them;

• Make it easy for everyone to stake in Ethereum through smaller decentralized staking pools;

• Run full nodes on lighter hardware.

Long-term goals:

• Make Ethereum quantum-resistant so you can’t just run a quantum computer and generate someone else’s private key.

• If zkEVM works well, then making txn space in the base layer makes rolling much cheaper;

• Finding stronger cryptography;

• Finally, keep an open mind!