Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article titled "Simplifying the L1", in which he pointed out that one of the biggest advantages of Bitcoin is its very simple protocol. Historically, Ethereum has often failed to achieve this (sometimes due to personal considerations), resulting in excessive development spending, various security risks, and isolated R&D culture. Vitalik hopes that in five years, Ethereum will become as simple as Bitcoin, including simplifying the consensus layer, simplifying the execution layer, implementing backward compatibility strategies for VM transitions, and simplifying through shared protocol components.
Vitalik concludes that simplicity is similar to decentralization in many ways, both of which are upstream of resilience goals, and its benefits will become increasingly apparent over time - Bitcoin itself is a good example. Vitalik suggests setting a clear maximum line of code target for Ethereum's long-term specifications, making Ethereum consensus key code close to the simplicity of Bitcoin.
