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The Design Art of Ethereum (Part 1)

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In an interview with Bankless, Vitalik elaborated on the design philosophy and original intention of Ethereum

Compilation: Rhythm Research Institute

As the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 is slowly approaching, those who once thought that ETH2 will never Those who arrived began to pay attention to the development of Ethereum again. On October 19, 2020, Bankless invited Vitalik to conduct an in-depth discussion on the design concept and original intention of Ethereum.

At the beginning of the interview, Vitalik simply reiterated the roadmap of ETH2, and said that as stated in the publicity, in Phase 0 builds a basic PoS public chain that anyone can use, provides sharding and Rollups for application expansion in the first phase, and can eventually reach 100,000TPS.

Why PoS+sharding

A complex system like PoS is mainly used to achieve several key goals, one is to eliminate the inefficiency and energy waste of the PoW system, and as the ASIC becomes more and more mature, the PoW system needs to avoid the risk of centralization . Compared with the PoW system, the PoS system is more democratic and open, and people can more easily participate in the network, whether they are ordinary users or pledgers.

Sharding is an expansion solution whose main purpose is to increase the total transaction volume that Ethereum can handle. Scalability is critical for Ethereum, because Ethereum should be a global public infrastructure that anyone can interact with. As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet in the new era, it should be open and accessible to anyone. If the decentralized expansion solution of sharding is not adopted, the alternative solution may be to let the centralized organization run a super network and then access the trusted side chain, but this is not what Vitalik wants to build. There have been many historical events that have proved that a transitionally centralized system is very easy to be manipulated, and will eventually deviate from the original design intention of the designer.

Keep the original intention of Ethereum

Go Centralized permissionless network

The Ethereum network does not want to be the kind of network that relies on super nodes, which is also the case of Ethereum Where the network distinction goes to other networks. Ethereum should be a fully functioning system without relying on any supercomputers, ideally a bunch of home laptops running the Ethereum network. As some Bitcoin believers have said, if the network is over-centralized and controlled by a few institutions, it may eventually go in an unsatisfactory direction.

EHT2 wants to create a PoS ecosystem in which anyone can participate, which is why Ethereum has not been inclined to In the way of super nodes, they do not believe in the assumption of "majority honesty", which is very similar to the idea of Bitcoin. In the network, it is better for participants to verify the chain by themselves and try not to trust miners, because miners are not necessarily honest.

In general:

1. ETH2 is more environmentally friendly and efficient;

2. ETH2 guarantees that most ordinary users Can directly participate in the writing of the chain;

3. At the same time, it ensures that most ordinary users can

4. Allow most ordinary users to participate in the consensus of the chain .

If you integrate 2, 3, and 4 together, you will get a zone that is strong against auditing and social and political attacks blockchain.

Do people really care about these characteristics that Ethereum insists on?

There are many competing products of Ethereum that are decentralized, permissionless, and Ethereum insists on conservative features Compromise, but in essence, the centralized path can be very efficient in the short term, but it will have serious side effects in the long run. For example, a typical example is Steemit, which was acquired by Justin Sun. Excessive centralization will eventually lead to community forks. EOS has also seen bribing attacks. Ultimately, the core participants in the centralized chain will collude to erode the rights and interests of ordinary users.

From the perspective of governance, if the voting governance power of a chain is in the hands of those large currency holders, in the long run Look at this is very dangerous.

So in the long run, users are very concerned about such characteristics as decentralization and permissionlessness. These qualities take time for people to slowly realize their importance. When the general environment is good, there are no disputes in the community, and everyone’s opinions tend to be unified. In this case, everyone is happy and there will be no problems in governance. But when there is a problem, there will be disputes in the community, opinions will no longer be unified, and the rights and interests of those users who are over-centralized chains may be damaged.

Other communities that uphold these qualities

Coda is very good. They are trying to create a chain that can use zero-knowledge proof, so that zk snark can directly verify the chain instead of individuals, and nodes cannot directly do evil. Mimblewimble and ETC are also good. Although ETC does not implement sharding, it tries to maintain a decentralized expansion plan.

However, for projects that adhere to these characteristics as selling points, they are not as popular as projects that focus on other concepts. Because insisting on these characteristics is bound to mean that the stories that can be told are limited, but if stories are told using other concepts, then many things can be told. Although there will be very few chains featuring these qualities, Vitalik believes that this part of the project will eventually be successful.

PoS and sharding

Before the release of ETH1.0, PoS and sharding have been identified as the direction to improve ETH. Vitalik answered the question of how the community chooses the technical direction in the early stage.

As early as 2015, the community basically reached a consensus on the technical path of PoS and sharding. The occurrence of the DAO fork reinforces this. Those who opposed PoS and sharding also opposed the DAO fork, so they finally chose to support ETC.

It did take a while to be convinced that PoS and sharding were the right technical direction. Look back at the original article about Slasher blog You will find that at the beginning of this article: Slasher is preparing for the possible implementation of PoS in the future. In January 2014, Vitalik was not sure whether POS There are inherent flaws.

If you look back at sharding, Vitalik thought that blockchain application sharding technology was an unsolved problem question. In this blog, Sharding and Several problems were listed together as problems that could not be solved by the blockchain at that time, or problems that could be solved but required essential trade-offs.

After 2014, another issue has become the focus of heated discussions, that is, the "Nothing at Stake" of the PoS system ” question, Vitalik in this Article has the answer. Although PoS cannot have exactly the same characteristics as PoW, PoS can absorb the advantages of the PoW system as much as possible.

During 16 to 17 years, people conducted in-depth research on other consensus algorithms, and finally figured out how to The security model of PoW is applied to PoS.

For sharding, the main problem is how to choose the best security model. In 2015, Vitalik and the technical community began to try random sampling (Random Sampling), which is a breakthrough in applying sharding technology to the chain. In 2017, the community completed a breakthrough in the proof of data availability, which allowed the shard chain to remain safe in the case of "majority dishonesty". After these explorations, we found that sharding is a feasible solution.

When ETH1.0 was released in 2015, we thought that PoS should be realized in one to one and a half years, but It shows that the ideas at the time were too optimistic, but everyone was very confident at the time.

Looking at the token distribution mechanism from the monetary policy of Ethereum

The consensus of the community on Ethereum’s monetary policy was not the same as it is now. If you look at the original Ethereum white paper, you will find that the original issuance plan was to issue 16 million ETHs per year and issue them permanently. The rationale behind this policy is that the system needs to keep issuing more tokens to keep the system safe. At that time, the community believed that the security cost of PoS was not necessarily lower than that of PoW, so it was possible to maintain the PoW mechanism forever. And the community hopes that not only those who participate in the network now can get ETH, but those who participate in the network in the future should also be able to get ETH. This was the design logic at the time.

After that, Vitalik and the technical team thought that although PoS is necessary and feasible, PoW may be the most equal and fair distribution method. From 2010 to 2013, PoW was considered the most democratic token distribution model, and even became a major selling point of BTC at that time: as long as you turn on your computer, you can get some BTC. This may also be the most attractive point of BTC at that time. But in fact, PoW cannot form a long-term stable technical equilibrium. When mining is very profitable, specialized mining machines will appear. BTC is the best example, from the GPU revolution to the FPGA revolution to the ASIC revolution. For Ethereum, although its PoW algorithm has special resistance to ASICs to ensure the fairness of ETH mining, as time goes on, GPU-based systems will become more and more money-oriented. and resources, it may eventually cause ETH HASH to suffer ASIC risks.

So PoW will go to ASIC anyway. Although ETH is mined using GPUs, professional ETH miners drive amateur miners out of the market.

This is the problem of the PoW mining mechanism, BTC already has the problem of plutocratic rule, and it is only time for ETH No matter how the algorithm is improved, it is unavoidable to move towards ASIC.

The design challenge of the token distribution mechanism is to ensure its neutrality. The advantage of the PoW system is that people know what the algorithm looks like, anyone can do verification, and anyone can participate. But the method of distribution through social media like Ripple is very unfair. First, not everyone can participate in it. Second, hackers can register 10,000 accounts in order to get tokens. You don’t want to see the underlying public chain. The token distribution model is like this. For the PoS system, its essence is to redistribute tokens to token holders and allow token holders to maintain network security. Apart from the existing PoS and PoW token distribution mechanisms, there is no more neutral token distribution mechanism now. If there is a slight change in the distribution mechanism of PoW and PoS, there may be other disputes.

PoW V.S PoS

Many people think that the disadvantage of PoS is that as long as you participate in the network to get tokens at the time of creation, you can participate in the network forever as a pledger, but the miners in PoW need to update their hardware facilities all the time.

Vitalik believes that POS is not 100% better than POW. From this point of view, PoW is better in reducing long-term capture on PoS.

First of all, the PoW market is still very young and may be often affected by outside influences, but these problems may The PoW market is no longer a problem. But regarding the thermodynamic limit issue that is often discussed by BTC miners, when the cost of producing a hash answer is as low as the limit, the efficiency cannot be improved, and this will indeed become a problem that PoW cannot solve. Secondly, for POS, if you have 32 ETH, you can become a validator yourself and get more tokens. If you don’t have that much ETH, you can also get ETH by staking with other people. In the PoW system, you must have enough start-up funds to buy a mining machine, otherwise it is impossible for you to mine. In this way, PoS also eliminates the problem of excessive concentration of wealth. Finally, the return of POS is generally lower than that of POW, and the more people involved, the lower the return.

So in general, PoW has its advantages, while PoS is easier to participate but the benefits will be lower.

The most important point is what if someone owns 51% of the coins or 51% of the computing power. Compared with PoW, PoS gives the community more rescue solutions. For POW, you can only watch the 51% attack happen. Maybe you can soft fork, but the attacker can continue to attack the forked chain. Vitalik calls this attack "SPAWN CAMP ATTAC". To solve the problem, just Only the POW algorithm can be changed, but this not only hurts the attacker, but also hurts ordinary miners. When the PoW algorithm is changed, no one will have ASIC mining machines with the new algorithm for a period of time. If the attacker monopolizes the CPU and GPU market, the attacker can continue to launch attacks, and then the chain will be over. So for the PoW chain, there is nothing he can do about it with a 51% attack. But it’s different for the POS system. Those who are attacked can restart another fork chain and delete the coins obtained by the attacker on the fork chain. You don’t need a hard fork. So the attacker loses a lot of coins every time they attack.

Why participate in the pledge of ETH2

< p line="zyWP">Vitalik sees this as an announcement to be a citizen of Ethereum, and also get income as an incentive.

If you cannot be a validating block node, you should also try to participate in the network to verify the Ethereum network. The reason is mentioned in this article, You don’t have to verify everything on the chain, you can selectively verify, such as verifying data availability, or verifying fraud proofs, or even running a light node to prevent you from trusting a certain node. This kind of autonomous behavior is not only beneficial to users themselves, but will ultimately benefit the entire Ethereum ecosystem.