Summary
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Summary
The much-anticipated Ethereum "Constantinople" hard fork is planned to be carried out at the Ethereum block height of 7,280,000, and is expected to be on March 1, Beijing time. The technical upgrade of Ethereum this time adopts a hard fork method. The so-called hard fork refers to the introduction of new features by revising the agreement, which may invalidate the previous version of the agreement. Therefore, the rule changes caused by the hard fork are not forward compatible, and the old nodes cannot confirm the blocks generated by the new nodes, so the old and new nodes will start to run on different chains.
At the beginning of its design, the goal of Ethereum was not just a digital currency similar to Bitcoin, but a decentralized application platform. Before reaching its final goal, it needs to go through different stages of upgrading, and at each stage Ethereum will introduce new features to make the system more stable and powerful. To this end, the founding team of Ethereum set four development stages for it: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity, and the conversion between different stages is through hard points. Fork way to achieve.
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The Constantinople hard fork is the second phase of the Ethereum Metropolis (metropolis), and its purpose is to lay the foundation for the final transition of Ethereum to the fourth phase of the PoS mechanism by reducing fees and improving blockchain efficiency. The name of the Constantinople hard fork comes from Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Since Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, is a Russian, and Russia has historically inherited the tradition of the Orthodox Church of the Eastern Roman Empire, so this name.
A few days ago, the spokesperson of the Ethereum Foundation stated that the Ethereum "Constantinople" fork will be activated on March 1; at that time, the relevant improvement plan of this round of hard fork will be officially deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. The market generally believes that through this hard fork, the transaction processing speed of Ethereum will increase significantly, and the reduction of ETH output will help its price rise. Now let's take a closer look at the "Constantinople" hard fork and its future impact on Ethereum.
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1.1. Hard fork and soft fork
The so-called hard fork refers to the introduction of new features through the revision of the agreement, which may invalidate the previous version of the agreement. That is, blocks that are considered valid by nodes running the new version of the protocol will be deemed invalid by nodes running the old version of the protocol. Old nodes will think that other branches are the longest and most effective branches of the blockchain, and will continue to expand this branch until all old nodes are upgraded. feature, making the existing validation rules more stringent. At this time, the old nodes will still receive all the blocks, while the new blocks will reject some. At this time, the old nodes may dig some invalid blocks, so the old nodes will be encouraged to update the protocol. This avoids permanent splits caused by hard forks, and only produces some temporary small forks.
In short, the rule changes caused by the hard fork are not forward compatible, and the old nodes cannot recognize the blocks generated by the new nodes, so the old and new nodes will start to run on different chains; while the rule changes caused by the soft fork can be Forward compatibility, old nodes can be compatible with blocks generated by new nodes.
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1.2. The development route of Ethereum
At the beginning of its design, the goal of Ethereum was not just a digital currency similar to Bitcoin, but a decentralized application platform. Before reaching its final goal, it needs to go through different stages of upgrading, and at each stage Ethereum will introduce new features to make the system more stable and powerful. To this end, the founding team of Ethereum set four development stages for it: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity, and the conversion between different stages is through hard points. Fork way to achieve.
1.2.1. Frontier
Frontier is the experimental stage of the initial release of Ethereum in July 2015. As the initial version of Ethereum, it adopts a model similar to Bitcoiners. The software at this stage is still immature, equivalent to a blank version of the Ethereum network, with only a command interface and no graphical interface, but it can perform basic mining, learning, and testing distributed applications (DApps). This version is mainly aimed at professional developers, and the technical development threshold is relatively high.
1.2.2. Homestead
The so-called difficulty bomb refers to the addition of a difficulty factor that increases exponentially every 100,000 blocks in addition to adjustments based on the block generation time and the difficulty of the previous block when calculating the difficulty. As the height of the block increases, the proportion of the exponentially increasing difficulty factor will increase significantly, which will greatly increase the difficulty of producing blocks, and it will be difficult for miners to dig out new blocks. As it becomes more and more difficult to generate blocks, the final block will be completely frozen and unable to be generated. This process is also called "Ice Age". With this expectation, the hard fork caused by switching to PoS will not be a difficult choice.
The original intention of the difficulty bomb design is good. However, due to various reasons, the plan of the Ethereum to PoS mechanism has been continuously delayed, which also delayed the conversion time from the PoW mechanism to the PoS mechanism. In order to maintain the normal operation of the Ethereum network, the difficulty The bomb code has been modified several times to delay the arrival of the "Ice Age", so its motivational effect is no longer as good as it used to be.
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1.2.3. Metropolis
"Metropolis" is the third stage of Ethereum development, which will be divided into two parts: "Byzantium" and "Constantinople". We are now in the Byzantine phase of Metropolis, and on March 1, 2019, Ethereum will usher in the "Constantinople" fork.
The "Byzantine" fork began in October 2017, and the Ethereum network successfully achieved a hard fork around block 4370000. At this stage, Ethereum still adopts the PoW mechanism 100%, but Ethereum introduces a graphical interface that allows non-technical users to use it easily, which is the Mist browser. In addition, due to the blockage of the development of the PoS mechanism, in order to prevent the difficulty bomb from affecting the performance of the network, Ethereum also calculates the mining difficulty according to the height of 3 million blocks, so the block generation time returns to about 15 seconds. But to prevent inflation, the block reward was also reduced from 5ETH to 3ETH.
1.2.4. Serenity
"Serenity" is the fourth phase of Ethereum, and the specific time is to be determined. At this stage, Ethereum will fully use the PoS mechanism, after which the Ethereum network will no longer need miners to mine. In the Devcon 4 conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik described in detail the major changes that Ethereum will undergo during the quiet phase.
In the "Tranquility" plan, Ethereum will add a PoS chain-Beacon Chain in addition to the PoW chain. There will be two roles on this chain - block producers and validators. Deposit 32 ETH on the chain to become a confirmer. The confirmer has the right to generate blocks and has the opportunity to be selected as a verifier. The final confirmation method on the chain will also be changed from PoW's 6-block confirmation to Casper FFG finality confirmation. In addition, due to the merger of the PoS mechanism development team and the Sharding development team, the Shard Chain will be officially launched during the quiet phase, and will be used to actually process data and operate independently to improve the efficiency and security of Ethereum.
Currently, the Tranquility phase will be completed in four phases. The standards for the first two phases have been updated on Github. The specific arrangements for the four phases are as follows:
The first stage: Beacon chain goes online
The third stage: EVM2.0 goes online
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2. The twists and turns of the "Constantinople" hard fork
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2.1. Major upgrade proposals for "Constantinople"
In the upcoming "Constantinople" hard fork, there are mainly 5 update plans including EIP-145, EIP-1052, EIP-1283, EIP-1014 and EIP-1234, as follows:
(1) EIP-145: bitwise shifting
EIP-145 is mainly written by two technical staff, Alex Beregszaszi and Pawel Bylica. The current Ethereum virtual machine lacks bitwise transfer operators. Although the shift operation can be implemented by arithmetic operators, the cost is relatively high and the processing time is relatively long. For example, it takes 35 gas to achieve left shift and right shift by using arithmetic, but only 3 gas is consumed after using EIP-145 scheme, so the cost of running certain smart contracts after adopting EIP-145 will be significantly reduced.
(2) EIP-1052: EXTCODEHASH opcode
Smart contracts usually need to check the bytecode of other contracts, but in many cases, the smart contract itself does not need the bytecode of other contracts. Checking the bytecode of other contracts is mainly performed through the EXTCODECOPY operator, so if many smart contracts need to be checked, it will be expensive. Therefore, EIP-1052 proposes to use a new operator — EXTCODEHASH, which will return the keccak256 hash of the contract bytecode, which is more efficient and cost-effective.
（4）EIP-1014：Skinny CREATE2
(3) EIP-1283: Adjust the net gas metering of the SSTORE opcode
EIP-1283 was written by Johnson and is based on EIP 1087. This proposal mainly introduces a fairer pricing method for data storage changes, which can benefit smart contract developers.
EIP-1014 was created by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, which introduced the concept of state channels into the Ethereum network. This would allow the settlement of transactions to take place off-chain, similar to Bitcoin's Lightning Network. EIP 1014 itself will bring a huge increase in the throughput of the Ethereum network, so the Ethereum network will be able to process more transactions per second.
Because the current Casper mechanism cannot guarantee 100% security, Ethereum adopts EIP-1234 this time, mainly introducing two proposals: one is to delay the difficulty bomb for 12 months, and the other is to reduce the blockchain reward from 3 ETH To 2ETH to prevent inflation caused by delaying the difficulty bomb.
After this fork, the Ethereum network will be lighter, faster and more secure. But among the above-mentioned proposals, EIP-1234 is the most controversial, because it reduces the block reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, which directly reduces the income of miners.
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"Constantinople" was first tested on the Ethereum public test network Ropsten in mid-October last year. It was originally planned to start a hard fork in mid-October last year, but before the fork, the developer team claimed to be on the test network. Encountered a "consensus issue" that has currently rendered a test network "unusable". Therefore, the hard fork was delayed until block 7,080,000, which is late January this year. However, on the eve of the fork on January 15, the smart contract audit company ChainSecurity found that EIP-1283 had a vulnerability to be attacked. For this reason, the "Constantinople" fork had to be postponed again.
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3. The actual impact of the hard fork
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3.1. The battle of the public chain, Ethereum started the battle of laying the foundation
As the king of traditional public chains, Ethereum has played an important role in all stages of blockchain development. It can be said that Ethereum is the most successful public chain platform besides Bitcoin. Ethereum occupies half of the country in terms of project fundraising, decentralized applications, and games. Whether it is the frenzy of project fundraising from 2016 to 2018, or the popularity of CryptoKitties in 2017, Ethereum, as a leader in the future blockchain voyage, has brought the unmatched imagination of Bitcoin to the blockchain world.
It is true that in 2018, with the rise of the DPoS mechanism, public chains such as EOS and TRON made different attempts in the implementation of the blockchain, and gradually eroded the advantages of Ethereum. Especially compared to the high processing speed of DPoS, Ethereum seems to be stretched in terms of applications, which also allows developers to choose the new generation of blockchain platforms represented by EOS and TRON in the wave of games that started in the second half of 2018. . However, the first-mover advantage of Ethereum still exists. According to the statistics of DApp Radar, as of February 27, 2019, the total number of Dapps on the three major public chains of Ethereum, EOS, and TRON is 1403, 329, and 167 respectively. The total number of decentralized applications on Ethereum is more than four times the combined number of Dapps on the other two major public chains, and the number of developers is huge. These are the advantages that Ethereum has over other public chains.
The problems brought about by the PoW mechanism of Ethereum are actually the inevitable result of the development of Ethereum, which is also related to the development strategy of Ethereum. The core of its strategy of transitioning from PoW to PoS is to establish a reliable digital cryptocurrency system through consumption in the early stage. After the system is completed, a more efficient PoS mechanism is adopted to ensure the operating efficiency of the main network. At this stage, it is still in the period of building a currency system, so this time, no fundamental changes will be made to the PoW mechanism. However, the state channel and offline solutions proposed by EIP1014 will make some second-layer solutions work. It is expected that after this hard fork, the TPS of Ethereum will increase by 5%-10%, which will improve the efficiency of Ethereum to a certain extent, and the proposal of the state channel will also improve the structure of Ethereum.
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Historically, Ethereum has gone through seven hard forks. Similar to this "Constantinople", there are hard forks in the "Homeland" stage and the "Byzantine" stage, while other hard forks The split is either for emergencies, or is small in terms of publicity and scale, and is not comparable to this hard fork. Every hard fork of Ethereum due to technological upgrades will bring huge market fluctuations to ETH. Based on this phenomenon, we selected the above two historical hard forks for analysis.
Historically, Ethereum has gone through seven hard forks. Similar to this "Constantinople", there are hard forks in the "Homeland" stage and the "Byzantine" stage, while other hard forks The split is either for emergencies, or is small in terms of publicity and scale, and is not comparable to this hard fork. Every hard fork of Ethereum due to technological upgrades will bring huge market fluctuations to ETH. Based on this phenomenon, we selected the above two historical hard forks for analysis.
From the actual situation, due to the release of the Ethereum Frontier version in the second half of 2015 during the hard fork stage of "Homeland", people saw the technical strength of Ethereum and the potential of smart contracts. "The version is generally optimistic, so Ethereum was on an upward channel in the months before the fork. During this process, there must be accumulation of bubbles. After the end of the hard fork, the optimistic expectations of the market will also end, so the hard fork After that, the price drop of ETH became inevitable.
According to the data of C, the hard fork of the Ethereum "home" stage occurred on March 14, 2016. ETH rose by 22.74% in the seven days before the fork, and rose by 136.45% in the thirty days before the fork. But after the fork, the price of ETH fell by 18.68% in seven days and 46.17% in thirty days. Similarly, the "Byzantine" hard fork that occurred on October 16, 2017, rose by 11.76% in the first seven days before the fork, rose by 40% in the first thirty days, but fell in the seven days after the fork It fell by 16.76%, and fell by 1.34% in thirty days.
From the actual situation, due to the release of the Ethereum Frontier version in the second half of 2015 during the hard fork stage of "Homeland", people saw the technical strength of Ethereum and the potential of smart contracts. "The version is generally optimistic, so Ethereum was on an upward channel in the months before the fork. During this process, there must be accumulation of bubbles. After the end of the hard fork, the optimistic expectations of the market will also end, so the hard fork After that, the price drop of ETH became inevitable.
