Vitalik Reveals Some Regrets About Ethereum's Initial Design

On May 30th, at this year's ETHBerlin event, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described some of his regrets about the initial design of Ethereum. Vitalik said he had a series of things he could have done differently. These things range from the development of the Ethereum virtual machine to smart contracts to proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms. He also said that even as Ethereum becomes more mainstream, it is still misunderstood.
"Based on everything you've known and learned in the last 10 years, how would you build Ethereum differently if you could start from scratch today?" Vitalik said that Ethereum's original EVM design opted for 256-bit processing instead of 64-bit or 32-bit, the original design was too complex for 256-bit, which is very inefficient, and could potentially generate a lot of redundant data on the blockchain even when performing simple tasks. Additionally, Vitalik said that Ethereum's switch from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake in 2022 should happen much earlier. Vitalik also mentioned: "The automatic log of Ethereum transfers should have been there from the beginning, it only took us 30 minutes to code, and yet it became an EIP." Vitalik's EIP-7708 submission on May 17 will make this precise change. Vitalik also said that if re-selected, he would use SHA-2 to encrypt Ethereum, rather than the current encryption algorithm called Keccak.