Vitalik: Reconsidering the "Cottage in the Mountains" concept, ZK technology changes the blockchain trade-off logic

Odaily Planet Daily reports that Vitalik Buterin recently stated that he no longer fully agrees with the old view from 2017 that blockchain “only records transaction order and does not promise state,” and explained the reasons for his change of perspective.

Vitalik pointed out that the early opposition to this idea mainly stemmed from the fact that if the chain does not promise state, ordinary users must either verify all transactions from the genesis block onward or trust a single third-party service provider. Both options are undesirable. In contrast, designs like Ethereum that commit to the state root in the block header allow, under the “majority honest” consensus assumption, verification of any state via Merkle proofs, making them more feasible.

He emphasized that the real shift in trade-offs comes from the development of zero-knowledge technologies like ZK-SNARKs, which make it possible to verify on-chain correctness without re-executing all transactions, thus “achieving both security and scalability.” Additionally, Vitalik reflected on uncertainties in the real world: network interruptions, service provider shutdowns, centralized consensus, censorship risks, and so on, which can occur at any time. Therefore, blockchain systems must always retain a fallback that is “self-verifiable without relying on others.”

In his view, a “cabin in the mountains” is not a daily living mode for everyone, but a safety net in extreme situations and an important leverage to constrain intermediaries and service providers. Maintaining such a minimal, autonomous, and usable path is an indispensable part of Ethereum’s long-term evolution.