Here's a quick summary of what Vitalik said during his speech at ETH CC in Paris.
Vitalik stated that the difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin supporters (Bitcoiners) believe that Bitcoin is 80% complete, whereas Ethereum supporters (Ethereans) believe that Ethereum is only 40% complete.
He believes that if the Merge is successful this September, Ethereum will be 55% complete.
The Merge is just a small step in Ethereum's scalability roadmap. Subsequently, there will be Surge, Verge, Purge and Splurge.
Once again, the Merge is not Ethereum's final destination. The roadmap is:
Merge => Surge => Verge => Purge => Splurge
Merge is Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
Surge refers to the addition of Ethereum's sharding, which further improves Ethereum's scalability.
Verge refers to the implementation of "Verkle Trees" (a type of mathematical proof) and "stateless clients", which allow users to become network validators without having to store extensive amounts of data on their machines. This greatly improves decentralization.
Purge is essentially cutting down the amount of space one requires on the hard drive, trying to simplify the Ethereum protocol over time and not requiring nodes to store history
Splurge… well you should know what that means.. :)
As of now, Ethereum is undergoing a long and complicated transition toward becoming a much more robust and powerful system. However, the eventual scenario will be for Ethereum to "settle down", allowing Layer 2 systems to increase functions for Ethereum.
Like what Vitalik mentioned, L1 is for security and dependability, L2 is for rapid iteration and action. Following the "Functionality Escape Velocity" thesis, once a L1 is strong enough, the rest can be accomplished by L2. Developers need a break, and new features need time to de-risk.
"Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain" Opportunities
Banning SELFDESTRUCT (Read more here) - Significant gain in simplicity, but comes at the cost of breaking backwards compatability
Reforming gas cost rules around child calls, memory (making it less wonky)
EIP-4444 - No longer requiring Ethereum clients to store the entire history. We will talk about this below.
EVM Improvements (Allow u to add other sections to EVM code)
Switching to Verkle Trees - Allowing for lesser storage of data for network validators and improves decentralization
EIP-4444
EIP-4444 allows for the pruning of historical data in clients older than one year. This came about because historical blocks and receipts currently occupy more than 400GB of disk space (and growing!). Therefore, to validate the chain, users must typically have a 1TB disk. This proposal will reduce the disk requirements for users.
This change will result in less bandwidth usage on the network as clients adopt more lightweight sync strategies
What Vitalik is scared of:
Adding support for multiple Virtual Machines (VMs), as that multiplies consensus complexity
Getting comfortable with base layer SNARKS (we should understand SNARKS more)
People not understanding the whole protocol, but instead choose to specialize on specific areas (Ethereum should be a simple-enough protocol that will allow you to wrap your head around should you wish to)
What's the focus? Decentralization:
Easy-to-use light client for consensus layer, execution layer and L2s as a default
Better support for home stakers, and smaller-scale decentralized staking pools
Run a full node on lighter hardware (especially once we have more zkSNARKS)
Long-term Goals:
Upgrades for Quantum resistance
Increasing transaction space in the base layer if zkEVMs work well
Looking for and adopting much better cryptography
Keeping an open mind :)
Before we end off, lets take a moment to appreciate Vitalik’s drip.