Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has proposed a potential roadmap for creating a scalable blockchain that is censorship-resistant. However, the tech-wiz has noted that it will probably take years before it plays out.
The revelation was made in a recent blog post titled Endgame in which Buterin argued that in order to achieve “the average big block chain”—one that has very high block frequency, very high block size, and supports thousands of transactions per second—the block production would need to be highly centralized. That is due to the fact that the blocks would be so big that only a limited number of users could afford to run a fully participating node.
As a result, Buterin’s proposed Endgame roadmap, which tackles Ethereum’s scalability issues while seeking to preserve high levels of trustlessness and censorship resistance, does not address the centralization issue, but still provides a plausible solution.
According to the suggested Roadmap, Ethereum should “add a second tier of staking, with low resource requirements, to do distributed block validation.”
It’s next move should be to enable users to directly and cheaply check block validity. This could be done by introducing either fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs and by allowing users to check block availability by introducing “data availability sampling.”
The Roadmap’s final move is to add secondary transaction channels in order to prevent censorship.
According to Buterin, “What do we get after all of this is done? We get a chain where block production is still centralized, but block validation is trustless and highly decentralized, and specialized anti-censorship magic prevents the block producers from censoring.”
Furthermore, Buterin insisted that even if one layer 2 particular rollup manages to support 10,000 transactions per second, it would end up with centralized block production. Layer 2 projects are blockchains built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, which is subsequently layer 1.
Buterin went on to argue that no matter what roadmap is followed, Blockchain will most probably end up centralised.
The tech mogul also shared his views that Ethereum is prepared to deal with whatever it may face in the future. This is thanks to the Ethereum rollup-centric roadmap which places Ethereum in a position in which it is “open to all of the futures, and does not have to commit to an opinion about which one will necessarily win.”
Speaking about big blockchains, Buterin said, “we’ll soon find out if their core developers and communities actually value censorship resistance and decentralization enough for them to do it.”
