Vitalik Buterin has reversed a long‑held position on “mountain man” full verification, saying recent advances in zero‑knowledge proofs and a tougher appreciation of real‑world failure modes make full, user‑level verification a realistic safety net for Ethereum. A change of heart Buterin’s new stance revisits a 2017 debate with cryptographer Ian Grigg. Grigg had argued for blockchains that log transaction order but not full state—leaving state reconstruction to clients that could then discard it. Back then, Buterin preferred committing state directly in block headers so users could prove values with Merkle branches under an honest‑majority assumption, rather than forcing everyone to re‑execute all history or to trust third parties. What’s different now The technical shift is zero‑knowledge proofs, especially zk‑SNARKs. These systems let you cryptographically verify that a chain’s state transitions are correct without re‑running every transaction. “We now have a technology that lets you verify the correctness of the chain, without literally re-executing every transaction,” Buterin wrote, adding that zk‑proofs deliver the benefits of full verification “without the costs.” He likened the breakthrough to a hypothetical inexpensive pill that cured all diseases—if it existed, healthcare would become dramatically more accessible. How this plays out: zk‑rollups and verification Zero‑knowledge systems already underpin zk‑rollups, which compress transaction data and push computation off‑chain while preserving the ability for anyone to verify correctness. Millions of computation steps can be checked rapidly by a succinct proof rather than redoing all the work, easing the classic block‑size scalability tradeoff: you can scale without forcing blind trust in intermediaries. Real‑world fragility and the need for a fallback Buterin also stresses that theory meets messy reality—peer‑to‑peer outages, latency spikes (from typical ~200ms to 1,000–5,000ms), centralized staking, and censorship events such as the Tornado Cash situation can make centralized or developer‑dependent fallbacks untenable. In those scenarios, the only safe option may be to “directly use the chain.” Because developers can become an accidental central point of control, Buterin argues the community needs a clear best alternative to negotiated agreements (BATNA): the “Mountain Man’s cabin”—a maintained, rarely used but vital path to full trustlessness. Why it matters Buterin’s rethink reframes full verification not as an impractical purist ideal but as a practical safety mechanism enabled by zk‑proofs. That has implications for protocol design, where guarantees about censorship resistance, verifiability, and user autonomy increasingly factor into engineering tradeoffs rather than just ideological debates. Market context Ether trades around $2,922.90, up roughly 0.34% over 24 hours, with daily volume above $25.4 billion. Bitcoin remains above $70,000, while large‑cap smart‑contract platforms such as Solana show relatively muted moves. Market participants appear to be pricing execution, censorship resistance, and strong verification guarantees as core fundamentals for settlement layers. Bottom line With zk‑proof technology advancing, Ethereum’s architecture can offer a true “mountain man” fallback: a verifiable, developer‑independent way for users to validate the chain without redoing all computation. Buterin’s reversal signals that these guarantees are not just theoretically desirable—they’re becoming technically and practically attainable. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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