The co-founder of Ethereum cryptocurrency told about the main drawback of the digital asset

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, called the centralization of nodes one of the biggest problems of the network. In his opinion, it can be solved by reducing the cost and simplifying the operation of nodes. The developer spoke about this in more detail at Korea Blockchain Week.

Vitalik Buterin explained that the ETN network currently has 5901 nodes, but most of them use the resources of centralized cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services. Accordingly, a centralized point of failure is being created for the blockchain. To solve the problem, Buterin suggests making the process of launching an Ethereum node cheaper and easier.

«Today, you need hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a node. But if network clients didn’t store state, you could run a node with almost zero resources. This is very important. In the future, we plan to make our clients so that you can run an ETH node literally on your phone,» the developer promised.

The Ethereum Foundation believes that true decentralization is impossible until node operators can run Ethereum on inexpensive hardware. According to Buterin, it will take 10−20 years to support fully verified nodes that can be launched from a phone.

Other steps towards reducing centralization include simplifying documentation, lowering barriers to participation in staking, and improving its security. The most serious problem with Ethereum is scalability, Buterin summarized.

As a reminder, in July, Buterin gave advice on the development of bitcoin. Back then, the developer said that if BTC wants to become more than just payments, it needs to experiment more. And the father of ethereum called the main problem of the flagship asset «a very strange policy with which he has nothing to do.»