- Vitalik Buterin has admitted that he “underestimated” several aspects of Ethereum’s development
- Buterin said that current upgrades had him wishing the team had made different decisions when Ethereum was being planned
- Delays in Ethereum 2.0 have caused “lots of regrets and wasted time”
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder, has admitted that he “underestimated” the difficulty of introducing sharding into the Ethereum protocol and how long it would take to transition to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Buterin also said that he had started the project with a 4-5 year mindset in terms of platform stability, a timeframe that he has now extended to 10-15 years.
Vitalik Buterin Laments Early Mistakes
Vitalik Buterin was speaking on an episode of the Hashing it Out Podcast last week and was asked by host Corey Petty what regrets he had over the project or what he would have done differently if he were designing Ethereum now. Buterin admitted that he has been taken aback by some aspects of the upgrades to the Ethereum protocol which have suffered several delays:
We definitely did…underestimate how much time it would take to finish a lot of the things we didn’t start back in 2015, with Proof-of-Stake and sharding probably being the two biggest things, and had we known it would end up taking years we probably would have designed the roadmap differently and thought about what the different teams would be working on and making a lot of decisions in that regard in a very different way from how we are now.
He added that these delays had brought “lots of regrets and wasted time”, before summarizing that “pretty much every technical feature we’re trying to implement on the Ethereum side now” was causing him to question decisions made in Ethereum’s inception in 2013.
10-15 Years for Platform Stability
Vitalik Buterin also admitted that he underestimated the time scale it would take to get Ethereum where he wanted it:
We approached a lot of early decisions with the mindset that we’d be building for 4-5 years and after 4-5 years the thing would stabilize, and now it’s looking like we’ll be building for something like 10-15 years…we will start to see a reprieve.
Ethereum 2.0, which will introduce sharding and will see the platform move to a Proof-of-Stake system, is tentatively due in 2020, although this looks less likely with every passing month.
