Vitalik: Re-examining the "mountain cabin" concept, ZK technology changes the logic of blockchain trade-offs.

Vitalik Buterin recently published an article stating that he no longer fully agrees with the old view from 2017 that blockchain "only records the order of transactions and does not commit to state," and explained the reasons for this shift. Vitalik pointed out that his early opposition to this idea stemmed from the fact that if the on-chain state is not committed to, ordinary users either have to fully verify all transactions from the genesis block or are 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 for the verification of arbitrary states through Merkle proofs under the "majority honesty" consensus assumption, making it more feasible. He emphasized that the real change in this trade-off is the development of zero-knowledge technologies such as ZK-SNARKs, which make it possible to verify on-chain correctness without re-executing all transactions, thus "achieving both security and scalability." Furthermore, Vitalik also reflected on the uncertainties of the real world: network outages, service provider shutdowns, consensus centralization, and censorship risks can occur at any time; therefore, the blockchain system must always retain a "self-verifiable" fallback mechanism that does not rely on others. In his view, the "mountain cabin" is not a model for everyone's daily living, but rather a safety net in extreme situations, and also an important bargaining chip to constrain intermediaries and service providers. Maintaining such a minimum viable and autonomously usable path is an indispensable part of Ethereum's long-term evolution.