Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly reversed his stance on a nearly ten-year-old question, signaling a significant shift in thinking around blockchain and self-governance.
In a recent post on X (Twitter), Buterin stated that he no longer agrees with what he claimed in 2017 about full self-verification from users being a 'strange mountain man fantasy.'
Why Vitalik Buterin is reconsidering Ethereum's self-verification assumptions
He explained that this statement reflects both progress in cryptography and lessons from real network failures.
Back in 2017, Buterin debated blockchain theorist Ian Grigg about whether blockchains should commit to state on-chain. Grigg argued that blockchains could log the order of transactions without storing user balances, smart contract code, or storage.
Buterin opposed this approach and warned that users would either have to replay the entire chain history or rely entirely on third-party RPC providers. At the time, the Ethereum leader believed that both of these solutions were impractical for an average participant.
At that time, he emphasized that Ethereum's commitment to on-chain state and the ability to verify values through Merkle proofs made it much safer to trust the network than to trust a single provider.
What has changed since then is the emergence of ZK-SNARKs, a cryptographic breakthrough that allows users to verify the correctness of the blockchain without having to redo every single transaction.
Buterin compares the development to discovering “a pill that cures all diseases for $15”—a transformative technology that provides security benefits without prohibitive costs.
He argues that the innovation allows Ethereum to reassess the trade-offs between scalability, verification, and decentralization that had previously been reluctantly accepted.
The “Mountain Man” option: Ethereum's safety cabin for a decentralized future
Buterin also emphasized the importance of robustness in the real world.
“Sometimes the P2P network goes down. Sometimes the latency increases by 20 times. Sometimes a service you rely on goes down. Sometimes miners or stakers concentrate power, and intermediaries censor applications,” he wrote.
In such scenarios, users must still have the ability to verify and use the chain directly without having to “call the developers,” so that self-governance is maintained even when assumptions break down.
This principle underlies his renewed support for what he calls the “Mountain Man” option. Full self-verification is not intended as a daily lifestyle, but serves as a critical reserve and a bargaining chip, a kind of ultimate safety cabin for Ethereum.
Just as BitTorrent pushed streaming services to offer better terms to consumers, the Mountain Man cabin gives Ethereum users power and security in the face of technological and political uncertainty.
Fundamentally, Buterin's reassessment is both technical and philosophical. ZK-SNARKs remove the previous barriers to self-verification, while practical experience has shown that centralization risks, network failures, and censorship are real threats.
By preserving the Mountain Man option, Ethereum ensures the network's long-term resilience and self-governing philosophy.
Buterin's change of course suggests that assumptions that once guided design decisions are no longer fixed, and it is crucial to maintain strong reserves for a decentralized future.
