Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has highlighted the centralization of nodes as a significant issue for the Ethereum network, suggesting that it could take up to two decades to fully address this challenge. Speaking at Korea Blockchain Week on Tuesday, Buterin emphasized that making node operations more affordable and simpler is crucial for ensuring Ethereum's long-term decentralization.
Currently, the majority of Ethereum's 5,901 active nodes are administered by centralized service providers like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS), which presents a potential centralized point of failure. However, according to the Ethereum Foundation, true decentralization can only be achieved when node operators can run Ethereum on inexpensive hardware.
Buterin pointed out that statelessness, or the elimination of dependence on centralized service providers for network activity verification, is one of the key technologies in making it technically easier for people to run nodes. "These technical problems will have to be addressed eventually — maybe a 10-year timescale, maybe a 20-year timescale," he said.
In addition to statelessness, Buterin also emphasized the importance of improving documentation accessibility, reducing entry barriers to distributed staking, enhancing staking security, and simplifying the process of staking Ether. He asserted that the most urgent concern for Ethereum is achieving higher scalability levels. Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups, which move computation and state storage off-chain to enhance throughput on the main Ethereum chain, are currently dominating Ethereum scaling protocols.
Meanwhile, Ethereum sharding, another solution aimed at improving the network's capacity and transaction speed by dividing it into smaller interconnected networks called “shards”, is being keenly pursued by the Ethereum developer community. Sharding also helps to decentralize the Ethereum network as it distributes the transaction load across many nodes. However, sharding presents its own set of challenges including potential attack vulnerabilities and centralization concerns.
As Ethereum continues its journey towards full decentralization and scalability, these complex issues serve as a reminder that there's still a long road ahead.
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