The dilemma with Ethereum has long been a topic of closed-door discussions among industry experts. The protocol layer code has expanded to hundreds of thousands of lines, with increasingly stacked cryptographic primitives. At first glance, it seems more powerful, but in reality, the pitfalls are deepening. The complexity of security audits is rising sharply; a tiny vulnerability could escalate into systemic risk, which is fatal for decentralized networks.

The core issue is not about having more features, but about maintenance burden and protocol transparency. When the codebase spirals out of control, even top security teams find it difficult to grasp the entire picture, and the trust foundation is subtly undermined. This contradicts the original intention — the century-long trustless vision of blockchain fundamentally requires a simple, verifiable system.

The improvement approach is quite straightforward: perform effective "garbage collection." Remove redundant parts of the core protocol and shift unnecessary complexity to the application layer or sidechains. Optimization proposals like EIP-6780 aim to constrain certain high-risk operations, using invariants to exchange for system predictability and security margins. Simplifying the main chain and strengthening infrastructure stability are actually the best prerequisites for scalability. The long-term value of $ETH ultimately depends on network trustworthiness and operational security.