Vitalik Buterin Reverses 2017 ‘Mountain Man’ Stance; Pivots Ethereum Toward ZK-Based Self-Sovereignty

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has formally retracted a controversial 2017 statement in which he dismissed user-run full nodes as a "weird mountain man fantasy," signaling a major philosophical realignment for the network’s roadmap. In a post on X late Monday, Buterin argued that advances in zero-knowledge cryptography, specifically ZK-SNARKs, have transformed independent verification from a libertarian pipe dream into a technical necessity.

The admission coincides with a stabilizing market, as Ether (ETH) hovered near $2,940 (+0.2%), shrugging off broader volatility to hold support levels established earlier in the week.

The ‘Safety Cabin’ Thesis

Buterin’s pivot centers on the maturity of ZK-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge), which allow users to verify the correctness of a blockchain’s state without downloading terabytes of historical data. This capability effectively solves the "state bloat" problem that prompted his original 2017 critique.

"The idea of average users personally validating the entire history of the system is [no longer] a weird mountain man fantasy," Buterin noted, reframing the capability as Ethereum’s "ultimate safety cabin" against centralized infrastructure failures and censorship.

This "Mountain Man" option is not merely theoretical. It addresses an urgent centralization vector: the network’s reliance on third-party RPC providers like Infura and Alchemy. By enabling light clients to cryptographically prove state validity via a smartphone, Ethereum aims to sever its dependency on institutional server farms.

Technical Purge: Killing the `modexp` Precompile

The philosophical shift is backed by aggressive technical housekeeping. Buterin recently proposed deprecating the modular exponentiation (modexp) precompile, a legacy feature he originally introduced. In a November technical governance discussion, Buterin admitted the feature had become a "major bottleneck" for generating ZK proofs, creating verification delays up to 50 times worse than standard operations.

Removing `modexp` is a prerequisite for "The Verge," the roadmap phase dedicated to making verification stateless and computationally cheap. The move would force legacy applications relying on the precompile to migrate to efficient EVM-native equivalents, effectively clearing the runway for a fully ZK-verified Ethereum.

Institutional Context

This pivot suggests the Ethereum Foundation is prioritizing long-term resilience over short-term developer convenience. By lowering the hardware barrier for full verification, the network creates a defense mechanism against regulatory capture. If "mountain man" verification is feasible, the network becomes significantly harder to shut down or censor at the infrastructure layer.