Vitalik Buterin no longer agrees with his 2017 view of "recording only transactions without committing state," due to mature zero-knowledge technologies like ZK-SNARKs enabling state verification without full transaction replay, reducing trust assumptions without sacrificing usability. He emphasized that blockchains must preserve personal independent verification as a fallback for real-world failures in networks, nodes, providers, or consensus—crucial in extreme cases as a counterbalance against intermediar ...