"ETH has reached a desperate situation where it cannot survive without reform." When Zhang Wei said this, the decline in currency prices and the failure of ICOs were casting a shadow over the future of Ethereum. Zhang Wei is a developer on Ethereum. He believes that this fork is "an adjustment for Ethereum to deal with the decline."
On January 16, 2019, Ethereum will activate the Constantinople hard fork at block height 7,080,000. It is reported that there will not be too many technical changes in this fork of Ethereum, mainly the reduction of mining rewards-reducing the existing block rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH.
According to Feixiaohao data, at 4 pm Beijing time on January 14, the price of Ethereum was $117.19, a drop of 92.13% compared to the same period last year. In terms of market capitalization, Ripple has taken away Ethereum's "second child" position.
The soldiers are approaching the city, but Ethereum is still "falling".
secondary title
in danger
Ethereum is experiencing its darkest moment, and the most intuitive manifestation is the dismal decline in currency prices.
According to Feixiaohao data, at 4 pm Beijing time on January 14, 2019, the price of Ethereum was $117.19, a drop of 92.13% compared to the same period last year.
On January 14, 2018, the price of Ethereum reached a peak of US$1506, with a circulating market value of US$140.66 billion. On December 16, the price of Ethereum was US$83.42, falling back to the price of Ethereum in May 2017, with a circulating market value of only 86.61 One hundred million U.S. dollars. Both the market value and the currency price have suffered the tragic situation of "heel cut".
The decline in currency prices has caused some entrepreneurs who rely on the Ethereum ecosystem to be deeply trapped on the top of the mountain.
As the founder of a digital currency exchange, Lu Wan (pseudonym) once revealed to Odaliy that he is a firm believer in Ethereum. He raised funds in March 2018. Because he did not "cash out in time", the amount of financing increased from more than 20 million yuan. , Shrunk to 3 million, he had to lay off staff and shrink business to cope with the cold winter.
There are not a few entrepreneurs like Lu Wan. It is reported that the financing of most blockchain projects is at the beginning of the peak period of the price of Ethereum, and most of them are financed through currency rights to isolate legal risks.
Today, as the core users of Ethereum, they all have to deal with severe reduction in financing, layoffs or liquidation.
Taking token projects as an example, most of the projects in the world are issued based on Ethereum ERC-20. According to the statistics of Gate.io Research Institute, among the top 100 Ethereum listed projects, the ICO breakout ratio is 56.10%, and the decline ratio in 2018 is 53.85% % (in ETH terms), the price drop in 2018 was as high as 93.41% (in USD terms).
Even more serious than the failure of ethereum founders is the retreat of investors. According to Bitinfocharts data, Ethereum active addresses are continuing to decline. Compared with the highest point (1.1 million) on January 4, 2018, the number of Ethereum active addresses (298,000) on December 30 was reduced by 72.8%.
The withdrawal of investors has triggered a series of chain reactions, the most important of which is the migration of developers.
"Investors retreat mainly because Ethereum can no longer make money." A developer who did not want to be named revealed to Odaily: "In addition, EOS and Ethereum have high versatility and the difficulty of migration is very low, so (we) chose EOS .”
Yang Zhen, the Chinese translator of the Ethereum Yellow Paper, told Odaily that it "only takes two or three days" for a mature blockchain developer to complete the migration from Ethereum to EOS and Tron, because the migration threshold between different public chains is extremely high. Low.
With the lure of money and the ease of transfer, a big migration from Ethereum to other public chains such as EOS is underway.
According to DappReview data, the annual transaction volume of DApp in 2018 was 33.6 billion RMB, 80% of which was contributed by EOS and TRON, which rose in the second half of the year, and the "king of public chain" Ethereum accounted for only 20%.
secondary title
inefficient upgrade
The Constantinople upgrade was originally scheduled for November 2018, but due to internal disagreements and project delays, the development team had to postpone the time until mid-January.
In fact, the chaotic internal management and low engineering efficiency are the reasons why Ethereum has always been criticized.
According to Yang Zhen, the Ethereum community is divided into two teams: the research team and the engineering team. The research team proposes a prototype to solve specific problems, uses a programming language for verification, and after the verification is passed, it is handed over to the engineering team to directly modify the client. Finally, the verification and implementation passed, and the final technical solution was determined through voting in the community, and handed over to the client team.
However, due to the gap between theory and actual engineering, "theoretically, the prototype can be achieved, but it does not mean that the actual engineering can be achieved, because the theory may not be able to simulate the situation of a large number of distributed nodes."
Therefore, the implementation of a theory requires constant adjustments and meetings to negotiate. On the other hand, because the Ethereum team is a globally distributed office, coordination is inevitably inefficient.
"Inefficiency is the biggest problem in the Ethereum community." Yang Zhen said: "Open source community organizations are like this, inefficient and inconsistent."
For example, the developers of the Ethereum Geth client are scattered around the world. One of the most common situations is, "Everyone will synchronize tasks, everyone will do their own work, and then do integration testing, but because everyone does not work together, so and The operating performance of centralized companies is definitely different.”
One of the more important reasons for Ethereum’s worries is rumored to be related to the departure of Gavin Wood, the former CTO of Ethereum and the founder of Parity (Ethcore).
"After Gavin left, there were no major incidents. The early technical architecture of (Ethereum) was supported by Gavin, because there is no technology master, and now the core development used to be a handyman." Liu Ming, an early investor in Ethereum (pseudonym) Said.
Yang Zhen also acquiesced in the importance of Gavin. Yang Zhen is the Chinese translator of the Ethereum Yellow Paper. He said that Gavin made decisions on engineering matters during his tenure, and his contribution to the Ethereum ecological project is the most obvious.
The early management structure of Ethereum was that Vitalik was in charge of the research team, and Gavin was in charge of the engineering team.
"Since the publication of the Yellow Paper in March 2014, there have been no major changes, which is enough to show Gavin's technical strength." Yang Zhen said that there is no doubt that Gavin's departure will be a loss to Ethereum.
Gavin is a Ph.D. graduated from the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, UK, and a talented programmer who led the prototype design, system development and release of the final test version of Ethereum. In addition, Gavin is the lead author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper.
Gavin proposed the concept of EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) in the Ethereum Yellow Paper, "If there is no Yellow Paper, there will not be so many clients later." Yang Zhen said.
Due to various reasons, Gavin left Ethereum, and the rumors involved internal conflicts and disagreements over the development direction of Ethereum. But after Gavin left, he made Parity (Ethereum client), and later almost monopolized the Ethereum wallet market.
Liu Ming said that since 2016, the ecology of Ethereum has hardly changed. The reason is that the engineering strength of Ethereum cannot keep up.
On the other hand, V God is also staying away from the decision-making of the Ethereum community, as if to avoid exerting too much influence on the community and deviate from the ideal of "decentralization" of the blockchain.
This statement was confirmed by Lane Rettig, a core technical member of Ethereum and a founding member of the Ewasm team. He said in an interview: "In fact, V God has not participated in the discussion of Ethereum technology at all, and the governance of Ethereum has also It's more decentralized."
secondary title
to quiet
On January 11, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it will carry out the Constantinople hard fork on January 16 at block height 7080000.
One of the most important upgrades of this fork is to reduce the block reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, and to delay the difficulty bomb by 12 months.
This move is considered to be an upgrade preparation for Ethereum's transition from POW to POS.
Miners are the ones most affected by this fork. This move is bound to affect the decision-making of the miners, but the miners' feedback to Odaily is, "Mine first, and then choose to mine other currencies or shut down when you lose money."
According to Arjun Balaji, founder of Shomei Capital, the upgrade could lead to a short-term bear market given the already high inventory levels of miners.
Will the currency price affect the consensus of Ethereum? In other words, is the currency price the key bastion for Ethereum to win this battle?
Yang Zhen's answer is no. He believes that Ethereum is still a good investment product, and the platform of choice for STO developers is also Ethereum. For public chain governance, it can be either developer-led or currency-holder-led, but for Ethereum, it is mainly developer-led, so the currency price is not important.
Lesser known is that the name Constantinople is derived from the god V.
Lane Rettig revealed: "V God is a Russian, and the Tsar has historically inherited the baton of the Byzantine Empire, so V God used Byzantium and Constantinople as the code names for the two network upgrades."
In 1453 AD, Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Empire, signaling the end of the Byzantine Empire, and Constantinople was renamed Istanbul.
Today, the name Constantinople is still used by the Orthodox Church, and it is still a holy place of worship in the hearts of Russians.
This scenario appears to be repeating itself in Ethereum. Lane Rettig revealed that the next hard fork of Ethereum will be named Istanbul.
Whether it is Constantinople or Istanbul, it is a geographical location in reality, and Ethereum has moved the beliefs of believers in reality to the blockchain world to become a linear time stage, but this time it is not for a certain It is not a belief in a single god, but a larger and more accessible belief.
There have always been two worlds in the blockchain, one is the ideal utopia of decentralization; the other is the kingdom of money, where gamblers follow suit with desire, and attract new entrants with sudden wealth and myths.
No one can judge whether Ethereum belongs to the former or the latter, but from the current point of view, Ethereum is moving towards the ideal of decentralization.
Yang Zhen introduced that the income level of Ethereum developers is lower than the industry average level, which is just enough to survive. Most developers contribute to the ecology based on consensus and belief.
Ethereum's opponent in this offensive and defensive battle is not BTC, nor is it a "successor" public chain such as EOS. On the one hand, Ethereum is different from BTC and BCH's "mining tyrant phenomenon that has been banned repeatedly". Ethereum has anti-ASIC properties from its birth. "There will be no people like Satoshi Oban in Ethereum who will come out to split." Zhang Wei said.
On the other hand, Ethereum is different from EOS's "node-man rule". Ethereum has no on-chain governance, and it is still a fair mechanism from the data point of view.
Ethereum is still the "king of public chains" as far as we can see, with the most complete and mature community and developer team, and it is foreseeable that this position will be difficult to surpass in the near future.
In this "Battle of Defense" of Constantinople, the opponent that Ethereum wants to defeat is none other than himself—whether the consensus on a better society can be fulfilled in time.
After all, there is not much time left for Ethereum.
It is reported that the process of Ethereum is divided into four stages: Frontier (frontier), Homestead (homeland), Metropolis (metropolis) and Serenity (tranquility).
And Serenity is expected to arrive in 2020. At that time, all Ethereum will be converted to POS.
Will that be a fairer, more environmentally friendly, and more autonomous world, and will it be the Utopia that the Ethereum community and believers look forward to together?
(I am the author Dave, you can add WeChat davesilly for blockchain reporting/communication, please note your position and reason)
(I am the author Dave, you can add WeChat davesilly for blockchain reporting/communication, please note your position and reason)
