Editor's Note: This article comes fromNakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp), Author: Sister Xiaocong, published by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Nakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp)
, Author: Sister Xiaocong, published by Odaily with authorization.
Lack of funds and teamwork will become a stumbling block for Ethereum 2.0? How far is Ethereum from 2.0? How far away from the "world computer"?
From October 8th to October 11th, DevCon 5 (the fifth session), the annual Ethereum developer conference, was held in Osaka, Japan, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation (EF). developers, researchers, client implementers, infrastructure operators, community organizers, etc. According to Coindesk statistics, Devcon 5 has attracted about 3,000 people.
Ethereum 2.0 is one of the most important topics in this meeting. The possible future of Ethereum is contained in the sharing and communication of many developers and ecological builders, from which we can also glimpse the current development of Ethereum 2.0 process, expectations and related issues. But what is Ethereum 2.0? What will it achieve? This article will continue to discuss in the next two parts.
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In Devcon 5, Ethereum 2.0 exposed a bunch of problems?
According to coindesk, the conference revealed many current problems of Ethereum 2.0, and even titled the report as Scam or Iteration? At Devcon, Ethereum Diehards Still Believe in 2.0 (Scam or Innovation/Iteration? Ethereum Diehards Still Believe in 2.0 at Devcon). Onion APP summarizes the problems reported by Coindesk as follows:
1. Expansion plan: "slower than expected"
Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum, and the founder of ConsenSys have previously said that the original version of the Ethereum network was not built for mass adoption and could not be expanded. Therefore, Ethereum needs to upgrade to 2.0.
But regarding the Layer 2 expansion solution, Ethereum founder Buterin (V God) said that the progress of some solutions was "slower than expected", and Raiden and Plasma did not make much progress. "But people are still iterating and working on it."
2. Migration of tokens and smart contracts: the latter has no clear plan
Upgrading from Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0 also requires a series of large-scale migrations, such as migrating tokens and smart contracts from the original network to the new network.
Peter Mauric, Head of Communications at Parity, the Ethereum client: "Ether coins migrated to phase 0 will be converted into new tokens. These tokens cannot be transferred on the chain for at least six months after the new currency comes out. Here Before, users have been in a locked state."
During a panel discussion on the transition from ethereum 1.0 to ethereum 2.0, Vitalik said that "eventually" there will be a roadmap to transition tokens to the new system "with little to no disruption." The audience also posed several questions about Eth 2.0, including the price of new tokens, price changes for these assets on the open market, and how exchanges will support liquidity during the transition. The Ethereum core developer group, including Vitalik, did not give a clear answer.
In addition, the head of communications at the MakerDAO Foundation and others stated that there is no clear plan on how to migrate hundreds of Ethereum-based tokens and smart contracts (including DeFi projects) to the new chain in the foreseeable future.
3. Ethereum 2.0 R&D: "Not getting enough money"
At the meeting, V God talked about the Ethereum Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation led by Aya Miyaguchi, (deposits) can also support community development for at least six years.
Most of the funding currently used for the development of Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 is still mainly from the Ethereum Foundation or ConsenSys.
However, a member of the ETH 2.0 team named Eigenmann said that the development of Ethereum 2.0 is not his focus because he has not received enough funding. In addition, another Parity staffer bluntly stated in the opening ceremony that "more ways to obtain the funds required for (ETH 2.0) protocol design" must be found.
4. Ethereum 2.0 development team: Gradually growing, but "lack of coordination"
V God said at the meeting, "There are many new faces. Most Eth 2.0 R&D teams have not been established before 2018." At present, there are 9 teams working for the Eth 2.0 client, including Protocol Labs, Chainsafe and PegaSys under ConsenSys, but in its own right.
Jamie Pitts, contracted developer of the Ethereum Foundation, expressed concern at the opening ceremony of Devcon 5: "I feel that they lack strategy. I think there are many teams working on their ideas, but there is a lack of coordination."
5. Ethereum Client: Not much new development, most ongoing work is maintenance
According to Peter Mauric, head of communications at ethereum client Parity, most funding projects related to ethereum will now be created on the new blockchain (Eth 2.0) first. The current Ethereum client, not much new development, most of the ongoing work is maintenance.
6. When will Ethereum 2.0 arrive?
In addition, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, publicly stated for the first time in July that the genesis block of the Ethereum 2.0 network may be launched in early 2020.
For the above issues highlighted by the media, Vitalik seemed a little annoyed. Today, he sent multiple tweets saying that Ethereum 2.0 is not a "scam".
V God said that this report is very unfair. Insinuating in the headline that Ethereum 2.0 might be a "scam" disrespects the years of hard work of dozens of people, especially since Phase 0 is still months away. He then stated that it was wrong to state that there was "no clear plan" for how to migrate from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0. The outline is clear: put the Ethereum 1.0 state root into Ethereum 2.0, and let Ethereum 1.0 continue to exist in Ethereum 2.0 as an execution environment. Existing work on Ethereum 1.X is already moving us towards this goal. V God also said that he may write some research articles in the next week about things he thinks people have misunderstood (including Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 conversion, DeFi composability, transition).
Putting aside the current problems of Ethereum 2.0, we still hope to see Ethereum enter the 2.0 stage in 2020, but what exactly is Ethereum 2.0? What is it trying to accomplish? This has to start from the beginning.
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Ethereum: Always aiming to be "a real world computer"
To a certain extent, the Internet can be called a "centralized database". This database can carry centralized applications such as Alipay, WeChat, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., and what the blockchain wants to bring is a decentralized network. And the decentralized applications it carries, thereby changing the way the world serves human beings and providing a new decentralized product and service experience.
In this decentralized world, Ethereum seems to position itself as a builder of a decentralized network and a provider of decentralized network infrastructure and technology. The official website of Ethereum defines Ethereum as follows:
Ethereum is the global, open-source platform for decentralized applications.
On Ethereum, you can write code that controls digital value, runs exactly as programmed, and is accessible from anywhere in the world.
In V God's view, blockchain is a decentralized computer network. In this network, the computer plays the role of holding data and performing calculations, and finally helps the network reach a consensus through a specific consensus mechanism. After reaching a consensus, it means that the final result cannot be changed. V God hopes to create a smartphone-like platform—a general-purpose computer where everything can be programmed to run.
At an event hosted by ETHPLANT in China, V God said: "The idea of Ethereum is not to support more applications, but to support a blockchain of programming language, users can use this language to write applications and Programs, the blockchain can process these programs, and transactions processed and published on the blockchain can accept and run these programs.”
And Ethereum, which is moving towards 2.0, is also moving towards "a real world computer". By greatly improving the scalability and performance of the Ethereum network, it can better carry decentralized applications and promote the development of the industry. Gradually burst out.
At present, financial applications built on Ethereum have begun to dominate the application field of Ethereum. DiFe opens up finance and provides a permissionless financial application and service network. It seems that it has gradually become a major goal of Ethereum.
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Ethereum 2.0: Towards PoS mechanism, sharding and eWASM virtual machine
Generally speaking, Ethereum 2.0 is a major technical upgrade of Ethereum to move towards the "world computer". This upgrade will greatly improve the scalability and network performance of the Ethereum network.
The technical upgrade of Ethereum 2.0 mainly includes three major technological innovations: the consensus mechanism of proof of rights and interests (PoS mechanism), sharding and eWASM virtual machine. To sum it up in one sentence: Ethereum 2.0 is a highly scalable, fragmented PoS blockchain.
In the past few years, the focus of Ethereum research has been on switching from the PoW (Proof of Work) consensus mechanism to PoS. The PoS mechanism can overcome the high cost and low efficiency of the PoW mechanism.
Reference article:
Recently, V God said in an interview with the "80,000 Hours" blog that the basic concept and design details of the PoS mechanism are issues that they have been thinking about for a long time, and now they have found everything they found in theory, and everything is working well . The problem that the PoS mechanism is now facing is only practice...
In addition, Ethereum 2.0 will support multiple programming languages, and eWASM will replace EVM. The EVM virtual machine is the core engine in the Ethereum network, driving the operation of the entire Ethereum, and carrying all the tokens, DAPPs, DAO organizations and games on the Ethereum. However, due to the bloated and complicated compilation work of EVM will consume a lot of gas fuel costs, the Ethereum team proposed to use eWASM instead of EVM, which can support Solidity, C++, Rust, AssemblyScript and other programming languages to improve work performance.
