Vitalik: Revisiting the "cabin in the mountains" concept, ZK technology changes the logic of blockchain trade-offs

ChainCatcher reported that Vitalik Buterin recently published an article stating that he no longer fully agrees with the old view that blockchains "only record the order of transactions and do not commit to state," and explained the reasons for his change in perspective.

Vitalik pointed out that the core reason for initially opposing this concept was that if the chain does not commit to state, ordinary users would either have to fully verify all transactions from the genesis block or be forced to trust a single third-party service provider—neither of which is ideal. In contrast, designs like Ethereum, which commit to the state root in the block header, allow any state to be verified via Merkle proofs under the "majority honest" consensus assumption, making it more feasible. He emphasized that what truly changed the trade-off was the development of zero-knowledge technologies such as ZK-SNARKs, which make it possible to verify the correctness of the chain without re-executing all transactions, thereby "achieving both security and scalability."

In addition, Vitalik also reflected on the uncertainties in the real world: network outages, service provider shutdowns, consensus centralization, censorship risks, and other situations can occur at any time. Therefore, blockchain systems must always retain a fallback option that is "self-verifiable and does not rely on others." In his view, the "cabin in the mountains" is not a model for everyone’s daily use, but rather a safety net in extreme situations, and also an important bargaining chip to constrain intermediaries and service providers. Maintaining such a minimally viable and independently usable path is an indispensable part of Ethereum's long-term evolution.