**[Vitalik: The Key to Ethereum's Long-Term Sustainability Lies in Protocol Simplicity and "Garbage Collection" Mechanisms]** BlockBeats News, January 18 — Ethereum founder Vitalik wrote in a post: "An important aspect of 'trustlessness,' 'passing the exit test,' and 'sovereignty,' which has long been underestimated, is the simplicity of the protocol. Even if a protocol is super decentralized, has hundreds of thousands of nodes, and boasts 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, with nodes using quantum-secure peerda and stark to fully verify everything, if the protocol is a cumbersome and chaotic mess composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five PhD-level cryptographic forms, it will ultimately fail all three tests: it won't be fully trustless, fully sovereign, or very secure. One concern I have about Ethereum protocol development is that we may be too eager to add new features to meet specific needs, even if these features bloat the protocol or introduce entirely new interactive components or complex cryptographic technologies as critical dependencies. While this may bring short-term functional improvements, it severely undermines the protocol's long-term sovereignty. The core issue is that if protocol changes are measured by 'how much they alter the existing protocol,' then to maintain backward compatibility, new features will far outnumber removed ones, and the protocol will inevitably become bloated over time. To address this, Ethereum's development process needs a clear "simplification"/"garbage collection" mechanism. We hope client developers no longer need to deal with all the old versions of the Ethereum protocol. This can be left to old-version clients running in Docker containers. In the long run, I hope Ethereum's pace of change will slow down. For various reasons, I believe this is ultimately inevitable. The first fifteen years should be seen as a growth phase where we explored many ideas and observed what worked, what was useful, and what was ineffective. We should strive to prevent the ineffective parts from becoming a permanent burden on the Ethereum protocol."