Ethereum 2.0 will set sail, are you willing to spend 32 ETH on board and sail to the PoS new world?

Winkrypto

特邀专栏作者

2019-06-13 18:32 (UTC+8)

This article is about 5887 words, reading the full article takes about 9 minutes

This article explains the upgrade process and participation methods of Ethereum 2.0.

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This article explains the upgrade process and participation methods of Ethereum 2.0.

Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNewsEditor's Note: This article comes from

Chain News ChainNews

(ID: chainnewscom), author: Li Hua, published with authorization.

For Ethereum, 2019 will be an important year, because according to the plan, Ethereum 2.0 will set sail this year, starting from the old continent of PoW to the new continent of PoS.

Meanwhile, Ethereum 1.0 will continue to exist and evolve. Ethereum 1.0 runs on the original main chain, and Ethereum 2.0 runs on the Beacon chain.

The planned voyage is estimated to take two years. Until 2021, after the shard chain can realize complete functions, 1.0 will hand over the actual operation right of Ethereum to 2.0, and it will withdraw from the main stage of history, as 2.0 A shard or a main storage contract exists.

How does the Beacon chain of Ethereum 2.0 work? How can ETH (Ether) holders "cross" from the PoW chain to the Beacon chain? And, to cross or not to cross? We will try to explore in this article.

Understand the Beacon chain

Let me do a simple science first: Beacon chain is a brand new PoS blockchain, which is the core component of Ethereum 2.0, but not all of Ethereum 2.0. The following points may be the key to understanding the Beacon chain:

1. The Beacon chain is a PoS chain that runs Ethereum's PoS protocol Casper.

2. Ethereum 1.0 refers to the main chain of PoW, but Ethereum 2.0 includes three parts: Beacon chain, shard chain, and virtual machine layer. Its structure is shown in the figure below:

3. The Beacon chain is the backbone of Ethereum 2.0, and it is also the first and most important component of 2.0. As shown in the figure below, all shards will connect to it and communicate with it, and the Beacon chain provides security and final confirmation for the shard chain.

The Beacon chain mainly completes two functions: one is to implement the PoS consensus, including maintaining a set of validators, selecting validators to form a committee, assigning validators to propose or prove shard blocks, and implementing rewards and penalties for validators, etc. It is a channel for verifiers to participate in the pledge system and obtain income according to the pledged rights and interests, and it is also a guarantee for the security of the entire system.

The second function is to realize the communication of shards. Each shard will store its latest state hash on the Beacon chain block. When the Beacon chain block is completed, the corresponding shard block is considered finalized, and other shards can confirm them and communicate with them. Cross-shard transactions. The shard chain and the Beacon chain realize cross-shard communication through "cross-linking", thus connecting the entire system together.

4. There is no virtual machine on the Beacon chain, there is no smart contract, and transactions cannot be processed; the Beacon chain does not store the information stored on the current Ethereum blockchain, it only stores the verifier list and Attestation. The so-called "Attestation" refers to the hash value that has been confirmed and signed by the verifier, and they record the status of a specific shard in real time.

5. The Beacon chain and the PoW chain of Ethereum 1.0 will run independently of each other for about two years. Before Ethereum 2.0 can achieve complete functions (currently expected in 2021), Ethereum is running on 1.0, and the blocks on the Beacon chain have no practical significance.

The above is the basic situation of the Beacon chain. Why is it said that the Beacon chain will not be able to officially run Ethereum until 2021? Because from the development roadmap of Ethereum, it can be seen that Ethereum 2.0 will support smart contracts and asset transfers in this year to achieve usability.

What will Ethereum 2.0 look like before 2021?

Phase 0 (2019): Launch Beacon Chain

The Beacon chain will keep an iterative design as simple as possible in the early stage, and accounts, asset transfers, and smart contracts are not supported at this stage. BETH can only be used by verifiers, and cannot be transferred on the chain, nor can it be transferred to exchanges.

Phase 0 focuses on getting validators up and running on the Beacon chain. Users can deposit 32 BETH (Beacon ETH) on the chain to become a verifier, but at this stage the verifier only manages the Beacon chain, and there is no shard chain at this time.

Phase 1 will add the shard chain component to realize Beacon chain + shard chain. But this stage is just a trial run of the sharding structure, not real expansion with sharding. The Beacon chain regards the block of the sharding chain as a simple collection of bits without structure or meaning. The shard chain still has no accounts, assets and smart contracts at this time.

It should be pointed out that in phase 0 and phase 1, there is no data circulation between Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0, and Ethereum still runs on the PoW chain.

The Beacon chain will support 1024 shard chains, each chain validated by a committee of 128 validators. The Beacon chain randomly selects a shard verifier for each shard in each cycle, and the shard verifier proves the content and status of the shard through "cross-linking".

Phase 2 (2021): Launch the virtual machine layer

At this time, smart contracts are introduced into the system, and assets can be freely transferred on the chain; the shard chain has changed from a simple data marker to a fully functional blockchain, and cross-link operations support cross-shard communication; some of the most commonly used Development tools may also be ported to Ethereum 2.0 to support EVM2. EVM2 is Ethereum's new virtual machine eWASM, which is based on Web Assembly and supports multiple programming languages to implement smart contracts.

Phase 2 will join the virtual machine layer, which is the last major component of Ethereum 2.0. The Ethereum that implements the Beacon chain + shard chain + virtual machine layer is a complete public chain system that we are familiar with. The availability of Ethereum 2.0 will be officially realized at this stage.

Although Ethereum's sharding technology roadmap includes a total of seven stages, after entering stage 2, Ethereum will migrate from the PoW chain to the PoS chain, truly entering the 2.0 era from the 1.0 era.

Is the 32 ETH boat ticket expensive?

The new asset in Ethereum 2.0 is called BETH, which has two ways of generation, one is converted from ETH in Ethereum 1.0, 1ETH generates 1 BETH; the other is to pledge BETH in Ethereum 2.0 to participate in Staking, and generate it as a verification reward .

Since in phase 0, users can deposit 32 BETH in the Beacon chain to become a validator, it can be understood as spending 32ETH to buy a boat ticket and follow Ethereum to the new world of Ethereum 2.0. The question is, are you willing to get on board?

Since BETH cannot be transferred and traded between accounts before phase 2, Ethereum and its various applications are still running on the PoW chain, so when the Beacon chain goes online, the only reason why users will convert ETH to BETH is to use BETH participates in Staking to get more BETH.

According to previous information, the conversion between ETH and BETH is one-way, that is, only ETH can be used to generate BETH through the contract, and BETH cannot be exchanged for ETH.

One problem this brings is that the price limit of 1 BETH is 1 ETH, and BETH will never be more valuable than ETH, because 1ETH also includes a right to convert from ETH to BETH; year lock-up period.

However, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently mentioned the possibility of two-way exchange between ETH and BETH in a discussion, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin also said in an interview that there may be a two-way mechanism. However, the two-way mechanism may bring about a new problem: BETH is issued additionally through Staking, but ETH cannot participate in this additional issuance. Two-way exchange is not good for assets on the Ethereum 1.0 chain.

The above two different solutions will affect the motivation of users to transfer assets from ETH to BETH, which may affect the stability of Ethereum's transition from 1.0 to 2.0. The question of whether users are willing to transfer assets to the Beacon chain will become severe after the arrival of phase 2, and the solution adopted by Ethereum may be continuously adjusted and changed according to the situation within these two years.

Now that the conversion plan is undecided, we might as well take a look at another decisive motivation for users to migrate assets: the benefits of staking BETH to participate in Staking.

At least at the current stage, users cannot participate in the Staking of Ethereum 2.0 with any amount of BETH by joining the equity pool. Users can only obtain validator qualifications by pledging 32 BETH (2^5) on the Beacon chain: users in the current Send 32ETH to a registered contract on the Ethereum PoW main chain, and the contract will generate a "verifier committee member business card" to allow users to become validators of Ethereum 2.0.

The staking return rate of BETH is shown in the table below. This is a proposal published by Vitalik Buterin on Github in April this year and has been added to the Ethereum 2.0 specification:

If a total of 1 million BETHs are pledged (2^20), the system can issue a maximum of about 180,000 BETHs per year, and the maximum annual rate of return on pledges is 18.1%; if 10 million BETHs are pledged, a maximum of about 570,000 BETHs can be issued each year , the maximum annual return rate is 5.72%; the upper limit of pledge is 134 million BETH (2^27), at this time, a maximum of about 2.09 million BETH can be issued every year, the inflation rate is maintained below 2%, and the return rate is 1.56%.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake believes that the pledge of 30 million BETH (2^25) is the most beneficial to the health of the system. At this time, the inflation rate is maintained at 1%, and the return rate is 3.3%. Assuming that each shard consumes an average of For 1000BETH Gas, the inflation rate will drop to 0.5%, and the rate of return for pledgers will reach about 5% (Chain Note: Drake estimates the best quality bet rate when Ethereum officially runs on 2.0).

Here are two indicators that can be used for comparison: one is the rate of return of depositing ether through financial products on Ethereum today, and the other is the rate of return of staking projects such as Tezos and Cosmos.

Another cost that validators need to invest is operational costs, but it seems to be within acceptable limits.

Eric Conner, the founder of Ethhub, after digging into the relevant specifications of Ethereum 2.0 and talking with relevant researchers, estimated the annual operating cost of the validator: each Beacon node needs 120 US dollars, and each additional validator, that is, every additional pledge of 32 Add $60 for BETH.

Therefore, from the perspective of return rate, the motivation of users to convert ETH to BETH before phase 2 may mainly depend on three factors: the number of BETH participating in Staking, the conversion method between ETH and BETH, and the threshold of 32ETH. (Chain News Note: This article does not involve the influencing factor of currency price fluctuations)

However, regardless of whether the 32ETH "boat ticket" is expensive or not, there are two types of users who may participate in Ethereum 2.0 immediately. They provide support for the operation of Ethereum 2.0, even if 2.0 has not yet officially run Ethereum:

One type of user is a participant in the blockchain ecology, especially a participant in the Ethereum ecology. It is valuable to invest 32ETH; Not so high. At the same time, as users who will hold coins for a long time in the future, using BETH to participate in Staking can allow them to obtain more BETH.

How to ensure the security of the PoS chain?

The Beacon chain is a PoS consensus. If users lack motivation to convert ETH to BETH to participate in Staking, will it affect the security of Ethereum 2.0?

In fact, Ethereum 2.0 ensures its own high security threshold through mechanism design.

The first is the penalty mechanism. If the validator has malicious behavior, such as voting for two blocks at the same time, the tokens pledged will be fined.

If the Ethereum 2.0 consensus fails, it will mean that 1/3 of the active validators have violated the reduction condition, that is, a successful attack is accompanied by the destruction of 1/3 of the total pledged tokens, which is The cost that the attacker has to pay——Different from PoW, under PoS, the “criminal tools” must be confiscated as well.

The other is the "verifier set-committee-certifier" block verification method of the Beacon chain: the active verifiers constitute the verifier set, a randomly sampled subset of the set forms a committee, and the certifiers in the committee are responsible for the blocks. Block signature verification.

Even if more than 1/3 of the validators in the set are dishonest, the probability that the committee is controlled by dishonest validators (that is, more than 2/3 of dishonest validators) is very low, and as the number of committee validators increases , the probability of the committee being controlled rapidly decreases.

Assuming we have 1000 verifiers, 333 of them are dishonest, when a committee consists of 1 member, the probability of the committee being controlled by a dishonest verifier is 33.3%; when the committee consists of 13 members, the probability of being controlled by The probability of control is only 10%.

The lower limit of the number of validators in the committee of Ethereum 2.0 in the initial stage is 128. Even if the dishonest person controls 1/3 of the set of validators, the probability of a successful attack is less than one in a trillion.

How does Ethereum 2.0 achieve randomness?

Under the effective mechanism design, the most important factor affecting the safe operation of Ethereum 2.0 is randomness. The execution of many protocols in the Beacon chain is based on "random numbers". Therefore, we briefly introduce the source of randomness in Ethereum 2.0.

Ethereum 2.0 solves the randomness problem through RANDAO + VDF (Verifiable Delay Function, verifiable delay function).

RANDAO is a way to generate random numbers, which will be built into the logic of the Beacon chain. Participants (here, verifiers) provide a random number independently, and RANDAO adds these random numbers to get a new number. And output the number as a random number.

But RANDAO has a disadvantage: the last person who discloses the random number can predict/manipulate the result of the random number. Because he knows all the previous values, he can affect the final output by whether he generates random numbers or not. Therefore, we need to add VDF on top of RANDAO.

VDF simply means that after a value is input, it takes a long time to calculate the result, but the result can be easily verified. VDF uses the random number generated by RANDAO as a seed to generate new random numbers, and the system uses the new random numbers provided by VDF.

Because the calculation time of the VDF random number is long enough (in Ethereum 2.0, VDF is 102 minutes), the last person who discloses the random number cannot calculate the result within the time he provides the random number, and cannot pass his own behavior to affect the final random number (in Ethereum 2.0, RANDAO completes the output of a random number every 6.4 minutes, and this time/process is also called an epoch).

The period of RANDAO is 6.4 minutes, and the period of VDF is 102.4 minutes. Therefore, there will be 16 VDFs running at the same time in Ethereum 2.0 to generate a random number for the system every 6.4 minutes. The Beacon chain will complete its work based on this.

It should be noted that the random number problem on the blockchain is a difficult problem, and RANDAO + VDF also needs to be further verified.

be a brave explorer

The test network of the Ethereum 2.0 client Nimbus has been launched. It is called testnet0, which runs a Beacon chain that can synchronize information between nodes, and the nodes can be distributed on remote devices.

This version sets up 400 validator nodes to maintain the operation of the network, of which 50 validator nodes are reserved for "brave explorers", and anyone can join. Here's a tip: If you run into a problem, you can ask it in the #status-nimbus channel on Status.

Prysm, the Ethereum 2.0 client developed in Go, and Lighthouse, developed in Rust, are both about to release testnets. If all goes well, the Beacon chain, Ethereum 2.0 in phase 0, will go live by the end of this year, as planned in the roadmap.

Almost everyone respects and loves Ethereum, but people also talk about its "historical baggage". If Ethereum is a ship, it appears to be a lumbering one, difficult to coordinate and slow to move.

But the bulky ship also has its own advantages. It has more complete and safer infrastructure, and it has a more persistent and thorough distributed route. If you look at the long-term, this kind of ship may be able to carry more ecology , a ship that undertakes a longer journey and finally reaches an unknown continent.

Now the ship is about to set sail and crew recruitment is about to begin. You, want to come together?

The specific implementation plan of Ethereum 2.0 may be adjusted at any time. This article is for reference only. Please keep an eye on the latest news.

Reference article:

Most of the following English articles come from Medium, and most of the translations are from "Ethereum lovers".

Reference article:

1. "Ethereum 2.0: The Beacon Chain", Bruno Škvorc

2. "ETH2.0 Engineering Guide", James Prestwich

3. "Detailed Explanation of the Beacon Chain at the Core of the Ethereum 2.0 Protocol", Ben Edgington

4. "Is the Ethereum POS pledge proposal proposed by V God reasonable? ", Qin Xiaofeng

5. "How to understand the economic incentives of Ethereum 2.0?" ", Eric Conner

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