Vitalik on the 'Cryptographic World Computer': The Paradigm Shift from the Bitcoin White Paper to Ethereum

Every core assumption of blockchain is being rewritten.

By: Vitalik Buterin

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

Editor’s Note: This article is an expanded written version of Vitalik's keynote speech at the Shanghai Blockchain International Week. Based on the speech, the author adds extensive comparative analysis and technical tables, systematically explaining how Ethereum is evolving from a traditional ledger to a 'cryptographic world computer', analyzing underlying transformations such as PoS, ZK proofs, and PeerDAS, envisioning the technical roadmap post-Hegota fork, and exploring a new balanced paradigm of decentralization, privacy, and scalability. Click to view Vitalik's speech at the Shanghai Blockchain International Week.

We refer to Ethereum as 'a blockchain', as if it is fundamentally similar to the Bitcoin technology created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. The two are indeed similar in many ways; even the 'streamlined Ethereum' planned according to Strawmap for the future retains the core characteristics of blockchain. However, this technology has undergone significant evolution over the past fifteen years and will continue to iterate over the next three years. By then, it will be quite reasonable to refer to the evolving form of Ethereum as a system of a completely different nature.

Today's Ethereum features general-purpose computing, a proof-of-stake mechanism, on-chain applications powered by zero-knowledge proofs, and layer-two networks that achieve scalability and privacy protection. The future Ethereum will flexibly adjust its computing power between extreme scalability and complete generality; it will have various multi-party block construction models, deeply optimized proof-of-stake, and zero-knowledge proofs will be embedded in the underlying protocol, playing a core role.

This article will outline some of the most important fundamental differences between blockchain in the 2010s and blockchain in 2030 from both a technical perspective and the system characteristics available to users.

First, we will study the original Bitcoin white paper section by section, comparing it with Ethereum, using yellow to represent Ethereum in 2015, green for 2025, and blue for 2030.

This image is adapted from the transaction principle diagram in Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin paper, showing the classic chain signature transfer model, indicating that the new scheme can aggregate signatures off-chain and submit only a single record on-chain, often replacing traditional signatures with zero-knowledge proofs.

This image compares Bitcoin's PoW mechanism with Ethereum's PoS after 2022: originally relying on continuously iterating nonces to find hashes that meet conditions, produced by a single participant, now changed to validator signatures, and in the future will utilize FOCIL to achieve multi-role decentralized block construction, with transaction-related signatures, proofs, and other components split and aggregated in the memory pool.

This image extracts the six-step process of network operation from the Bitcoin white paper, pointing out that its native design lacks capabilities such as memory pool aggregation, distributed block construction, and sender anonymization, while also explaining the improvements of Ethereum's PoS and PeerDAS: separating block construction from fork selection, requiring nodes to download only a small part of the block, and relying on parallel proofs to reduce consensus latency.

This image compares the Merkle tree pruning scheme proposed in the Bitcoin white paper with Ethereum's new storage strategy: Bitcoin can delete spent transactions to free up hard disk space, while future Ethereum will further reduce storage through state and history separation, SNARK proofs, and will introduce distributed state storage and diversified storage media optimization.

This image interprets the privacy approach of the Bitcoin white paper: relying solely on public key anonymity can only hide identity while transaction amounts remain public, which is insufficient under modern data analysis, while ZK-SNARK, FOCIL, and EIP-8288 can construct stronger programmable privacy, and also need to address the issues of query reading privacy and network broadcast privacy.

Almost every chapter of the white paper shows significant changes. To streamline the content, we have organized it into the following table:

Almost all core attributes encompassed by the concept of blockchain have either undergone fundamental changes or are about to welcome underlying transformations:

• Verification Mechanism: Download and re-execute → PeerDAS sampling and SNARK verification
• Consensus Mechanism: Proof of Work → Proof of Stake → Deeply optimized Proof of Stake
• Block Construction Authority: Single miner generates blocks → Multi-party collaboratively constructs blocks

In the tone of AI, the only objective and credible conclusion (well, the core point): modern cryptographic networks like the streamlined upgraded Ethereum are largely called 'blockchain' for historical reasons. In reality, it is a hybrid architecture that integrates two major systems:

1. Satoshi's core ideas
2. Powerful cryptographic tools born from fifty years of academic research, many of which either did not exist or were not mature in 2009.

How much cryptography is hidden in the cryptographic system? A comparison of the years 2009, 2020, and 2030.

Cryptography is not the only key discipline. Formal verification, database theory, improvements in P2P network theory, information theory, economics, and other fields are equally important. But these technologies can all accommodate this foundational logic: everyone attempts to generate the next block containing valid proof of work; when one person succeeds, they broadcast it, and all others download the block and re-execute it, repeating the cycle. The changes at the cryptographic level are completely different.

So, what does all this mean for users? The most important conclusion is that the dimensions in which users need to weigh trade-offs are undergoing a dramatic change:

When developing applications, computational structure becomes crucial. In a simple blockchain, one byte is one byte, and one unit of Gas is one unit of Gas. However, in future architectures: if you cram all computations into a single transaction that is difficult to decompose and executed serially, the cost for the same amount of computation will be much higher; but if you split the computation into well-encapsulated, parallel-supporting, or pre-trimmable independent tasks, preferably completing preprocessing before the transaction is sent to the final block, the costs will significantly decrease. This will change the incentive orientation for developers, and over time, the architecture of all Ethereum applications will change accordingly: In the long run, we may form a new programming paradigm—only the core information describing non-exchange state changes and execution order will be on-chain, while all other data will be aggregated before being included in the block.

Properly organizing computation can allow blockchain to focus more on completing its core tasks.

Perhaps the most significant shift is that the decentralized nature of the network is no longer merely a performance burden endured for security and robustness; in certain limited scenarios, decentralization itself can even become a performance advantage. Decentralized networks can store massive amounts of data in parallel; a large amount of computation can be executed in parallel, with many computations completed directly in the transaction memory pool. In certain scenarios, decentralization can also enhance privacy, as only decentralized networks can effectively hide metadata (such as the source of data and requests).

As early as the mid-2010s, this was Ethereum's early vision: decentralization is not just to enhance robustness, but to enhance scalability. Centralized systems can improve performance by splitting tasks among multiple participants, and blockchain can do the same. At that time, this concept could not be realized due to a core shortcoming: the verification mechanism. After task splitting, you must verify that each sub-task has been executed correctly. Early solutions attempted to solve the problem through randomly sampled committees, but all encountered the same bottleneck: first, committee deployment is complex and costly, and significantly increases latency; second, once the committee fails, there are no remedial measures. Today, relying on modern cryptography, this problem has been solved, and the additional overhead brought by this solution is decreasing month by month.

Another noteworthy direction where decentralization is expected to improve performance is latency. Ethereum's inherent latency can never match centralized servers, but the infrastructure built on Ethereum can achieve that.

Overall, building a strong decentralized intermediary layer (which is not a blockchain itself) between users and the main chain can greatly enhance Ethereum's capabilities while preserving the core characteristics of the underlying blockchain.

Looking further into the future, Ethereum may also usher in a new round of transformation—program obfuscation (iO) may rise. The ultimate goal in this field: mature and usable obfuscation technology can eliminate the trade-off between privacy and generality. You can achieve fully general computation with an unlimited number of (asynchronous) participants in a completely secure encrypted form. Even a weakened version of obfuscation technology has many practical scenarios, such as encrypted transaction memory pools. However, all the conclusions proposed in this article hold before this technology is realized.

This is the cryptographic world computer: Ethereum is no longer just a ledger where developers can freely write computation tasks and data and execute them; the new architecture integrates blockchain, cryptographic privacy, cryptographic verification, and powerful decentralized off-chain components into one.

There are still many challenges to fully realize this design. Making zero-knowledge proofs efficient and secure enough is not easy, but it belongs to encapsulated complex problems, which have already been optimized on a large scale with the help of AI tools. The more challenging and systematically complex issues are likely the management of massive states and parallel access. Many solution ideas have already emerged, but they still need continuous refinement, especially as we further understand what applications will run in the future.

Looking at the Strawmap roadmap, it can be seen that the Hegota hard fork planned for launch next year is likely to be Ethereum's last 'regular hard fork', and its functions and technologies remain familiar to developers from 2015. All upgrades after Hegota will include recursive STARK, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and full-system quantum resistance. The implementation of PeerDAS marks Ethereum's transformation: evolving from a simple blockchain to a much more powerful system. After the Hegota upgrade, this transformation will become the main line of Ethereum's development. The ultimate goal: to achieve a high-security computing system that is cheaper, more scalable, and better at privacy protection compared to the previous generation of technology. This is the cryptographic world computer.

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