Vitalik Buterin’s greatest regret over building Ethereum

Update: After this story was published Vitalik Buterin tweeted that he did not regret the delay to the launch of Ethereum, which was in July 2015 (the presale was in 2014). He said he was referring, instead, to its technical deficiencies.

Vitalik Buterin has a deep regret about Ethereum. The 26-year-old blockchain co-founder tweeted today that he believes the platform’s launch was premature. 

The second biggest blockchain by market cap, Ethereum launched to great fanfare in 2014. Buterin has since been honoured for his groundbreaking contribution to decentralization and the digital revolution.

But he revealed today that, had Ethereum launched just 10 months later, the defects that the development team have spent the subsequent years fixing could have been avoided.

Early design decisions, such as using Hex Trees as an internal data structure instead of the more common binary trees, were the main source of regret for Buterin. Another regret was using RLP—Recursive Length…