Ethereum Fork Countdown
Anyone who sees the word "Ethereum 2.0" will think that this is an upgraded version of Ethereum, which is indeed the original plan of Ethereum. Like Iron Man 2 must be a sequel about Iron Man. But perhaps, in the eyes of some people, Ethereum 2.0 is not as simple as a sequel.
"It's actually another new project." Brother T, a heavy participant in Ethereum, said, "It's not the previous Ethereum."
< p>This view is not consistent with the current market sentiment.
The penultimate week of 2020 will definitely be mentioned over and over again in the future review of the cryptocurrency field. Bitcoin refreshed its highest point in history, and Ethereum, which has the second largest market value, also officially opened its next new stage-Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0.
“Ethereum 2.0 is coming online very quickly.” This is the most consistent view about this upgrade. It is well known that the upgrade of Ethereum is not on time. Phase 0 was originally expected to be next year, but it was not expected to start so soon.
The advance timing has brought a lot of confidence to the market sentiment. In the 0th stage, a start threshold of 524,000 ETH mortgages is set, and it can only be launched when the requirements are met. As the price of ETH rises, the value of at least 32 ETH mortgaged by each node is close to the value of one Bitcoin, and the lock-up of more than 100,000 RMB does not affect the mood, and the start-up threshold is completed without resistance. As of December 8, more than 1.2 million ETHs have been pledged.
Technology, price, sentiment, confidence, Ethereum 2.0 looks perfect right now.
But the Ethereum community does not seem to be so optimistic.
Doubts about Fragmentation
Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, the most recognizable changes are Two things: one is the change of consensus, from PoW to PoS; the other is the introduction of sharding technology to expand network performance.
“It was reasonable when the introduction of sharding technology was proposed at the beginning.” Uncle Miao, the product manager of Spark Mining Pool, said, “But now we need to rethink this issue.”
Currently among the Ethereum community's solutions for scalability, Rollup technology has the highest status. From the founder Vitalik Buterin to the ecological application team, everyone's consensus is almost the same. Rollup's focus is on Ethereum 2.0. "We don't pay attention to 2.0 now, what we value most is Rollup." Yang Mindao, founder of dForce, told Rhythm BlockBeats.
Compared to Rollup, the status of sharding has been reduced from data execution to data storage, which Vitalik also recognizes. In the Ethereum 2.0 core developer conference call in mid-November, the core developers discussed that: Ethereum 2.0 may temporarily shelve its second phase plan until the feasibility of the data sharding layer Rollup scheme is falsified.
That is to say, Rollup is now recognized as the most potential expansion tool for Ethereum, and everything starts with the development of Rollup. If it doesn’t work, then consider using sharding for data execution. The current sharding function is only for data storage.
Legend: mid-November Ethereum 2.0 Developer Conference Call
“But if sharding is only for data storage, then in order to solve the problem of data availability, the research goal should be reset and feasible solutions, instead of directly using the shards that were originally used for capacity expansion.” Uncle Miao raised his doubts.
Regarding this issue, the domestic Ethereum community once discussed with Vitalik, but the dialogue did not result, and the two sides did not persuade each other. After all, this is a problem of the magnitude of the project roadmap. It is impossible to discuss it clearly in a few words, and this problem is too far away. Ethereum 2.0 has just entered phase 0, and there are still several years before phase 2.
But now there is a closer and more difficult problem than sharding: Will Ethereum fork happen if the consensus is replaced?
Legend: Vitalik in the community Expressing views on forks
Insistence on PoW
This is not a fork in the conventional sense cross.
“If the final fork really happened, then unlike The DAO before, this is not caused by accidents, it is caused by the roadmap.”Meow Another question of Uncle is the change of Ethereum 2.0 at the consensus level: when all technical improvements can be completed on the basis of PoW consensus, why use PoS?
Vitalik's point of view is clear, "Upgrading PoS is to improve security and efficiency." He responded in the Ethereum community.
On this topic, there was a heated discussion in the community a few days ago. Similarly, the consensus of the two most mainstream and used by the most projects is inevitable There are several places that can compete with each other. Not everyone agrees with the conclusion that "PoS must be more secure than PoW".
In Vitalik's plan for Ethereum 2.0, the Ethereum 1.0 chain (now the Ethereum PoW chain) and the Beacon chain will be merged at a certain point. The specific merger is just a proposal, and the idea is roughly: everyone votes for a block height first, after which, Ethereum 1.0 will stop tracking the status and start tracking the status of 2.0.
"What he said is very clear. In theory, as long as there are miners continuing, the Ethereum 1.0 chain will continue to run without being affected." Meow Uncle explained.
In other words, according to this script, we will see two chains called "Ethereum" running at the same time, one uses PoW and the other uses PoS. It is not a regular fork, but judging from the results, it is indeed a fork. "I think the possibility is quite high." Yang Mindao said.
The current one chain will become two chains in the future, and now one ETH transferred to Ethereum 2.0 at a ratio of 1:1 will have two prices in the future Different ETH, now the huge Ethereum community will be divided into two.
Regular forks need to use computing power to make choices, the protagonists of the choice are miners, and if there are really two Ethereum chains appearing at the same time, this The second choice that needs to be made is the overall ecology of Ethereum, the project party, the user, and the investor.
The choice of Ethereum ecology
DeFi projects have already accounted for half of the Ethereum ecology, But the basis of DeFi projects is the assets on the chain, "the agreement party mainly follows the asset side." Yang Mindao explained the views of the DeFi project.
The so-called asset side refers to on-chain assets such as USDT and USDC. DeFi’s mortgage lending ecology is basically based on the asset side, such as mortgage USDT lending For other currencies, there is no doubt that the DeFi protocol must follow the asset side. But from the perspective of the asset side, this seems to be a problem.
Using USDT with a current market value of nearly 20 billion US dollars as an example, it is impossible for the issuer Tether to directly announce that the issuance of USDT will directly double due to the emergence of another Ethereum chain. times, and if Tether allocates more than 10 billion U.S. dollars of ERC-20 USDT to the two chains, the ratio of distribution needs to be considered, and the assets on the Ethereum chain are not only USDT. Most protocols support a variety of assets. If USDT chooses Ethereum 1.0 and USDC chooses 2.0, it will be difficult for the protocol party.
"The asset parties should choose the same chain together." Yang Mindao said. In other words, the ecology needs to make a choice to choose a network that can really continue to be called "Ethereum".
If only one chain is selected, maintaining the status quo seems to be the optimal solution. "The fork will not take away the heat of Ethereum 1.0." Brother T said.
As a miner, an investor, and the founder of the DeFi project xDeFiLabs, Brother T cannot see the advantages of Ethereum 2.0. In his opinion, The current pain point can be solved by Layer2 or Polkadot. If they can't solve it, then Ethereum 2.0 can't solve it either. "I can't find a reason why people will leave Ethereum 1.0." He said, "I even invested in an Ethereum ASIC mining machine project."
Unlike Bitcoin mining machines, the current Ethereum mining machines use GPUs for mining. The better the performance of the graphics card, the higher the mining efficiency. The concept of ASIC chips has never really appeared in the Ethereum ecosystem.
But at the same time that Ethereum 2.0 is launched, the Ethereum ASIC chip mining machine is also under intensive development. "Bitmain, Linzhi, and Innosilicon are all developing Ethereum ASIC mining machines." People familiar with the matter told Rhythm BlockBeats, "The process is mainly 14nm or 16nm."
Miners are profit-seeking, and mining machine manufacturers must develop ASIC chips because they can ensure that miners are profitable. There are still two or three years of PoW period before Ethereum turns to PoS, and miners use ASIC mining during this period It is enough to be profitable, but from another perspective, if the mining machine manufacturer has judged that the life of a mining machine is only two or three years, why bother to develop a new concept?
"If there is a fork, I will definitely support Ethereum 1.0." Brother T's views represent the vast majority of Ethereum miners. "At present, there are no miners who have asked us to provide PoS services." Uncle Miao said, "There seems to be no intersection between Ethereum PoW miners and PoS nodes."
Who is supporting Ethereum's PoS?
The new force of PoS
In his opinion, although there are already many Layer2 solutions on the market, these solutions are more important. Like the system "plug-in", "No matter how powerful the plug-in function is, it cannot represent the strength of the underlying infrastructure itself."
In November this year, the launch of Ethereum 2.0 Becoming the focus of community attention, Li Zelin, who has hundreds of ETHs in his hand, considers that since he has decided to hold Ethereum for a long time, it is better to participate in the ecology and do something. In addition, he has a technical foundation, self-built nodes, Being a validator and participating in the staking system should not be a problem.
The preparations went well, and he also set up an Ethereum PoS WeChat group to exchange ideas. At 20:00 on December 1st, the Ethereum 2.0 network genesis block was officially launched. After 5 minutes and 23 seconds, Li Zelin’s node successfully dug out his first slot. Excited, he also posted a screenshot in Moments.
Many netizens posted on Twitter The news that he has become a validator
Li Zelin is lucky, the second day after the launch of Ethereum 2.0, there are more than 600 nodes in the whole network be punished for the problem. This is also a point that Ethereum 2.0 has been criticized for. Nodes must be online 24 hours a day, and they will be punished for going offline for any reason. This has also led to the rise of node service providers. Due to limited personal capabilities, 24-hour online and professional node service providers have become the most active group in the Ethereum 2.0 network.
But Li Zelin thinks this is not a reason not to approve PoS. According to his experience, choosing a node in Hong Kong, China instead of a machine in the Mainland can reduce the probability of block synchronization delay, and setting up a backup machine is a way to avoid accidents.
"The miners are very likely to initiate a fork." As a PoS faction, Li Zelin also recognizes the possibility of a fork, but obviously, he is betting on PoS Chain, "Users will choose the new chain of Ethereum."
His tone is as firm as the supporters of Ethereum 1.0 betting on the PoW chain.
Of course, the possible forks are still far away from now, and the PoS consensus has to go through many tests, including proposals, discussions, concept proofs, client implementations, and attack scenarios Verification and other programs can be really used. There is even a possibility that everyone finds that PoS does not work in Ethereum. Ethereum 1.0+Layer2 has been recognized by the entire community. After several years, the consensus has returned to the same level. Everything about PoS is a trial and error.
“Ethereum is still the strongest public chain up to now. Over the years, people in all communities can embrace the possibility of Ethereum’s failure in exploring new directions.” Uncle Meow said.
The DAO incident, the Parity wallet incident, and the current DeFi hacking incident, Ethereum users have accepted the possibility of taking risks in Ethereum, and so is Ethereum 2.0 an adventure.
This is a big adventure involving an ecology worth hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of users and developers, and the strongest public chain in the blockchain.
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