Countdown to Ethereum 2.0: The advent of the dual-token mechanism, mobile phones can also mine, revolution or nightmare?

Editor's Note: This article comes fromBabbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)Editor's Note: This article comes from

Babbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)

, author Wang Jiajian, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

What exactly is Ethereum 2.0? Is it a devil or an angel?

From Tuesday to Thursday, at 8 o'clock every night, Babbitt's first community interview column, Sheknows, joins hands with the ETC community and Ethereum ecological practitioners to conduct three consecutive live broadcasts, comprehensively analyzing the "post-Ethereum era", and easily uncovering Ethereum for you The mystery of 2.0.

The first session will be on the 23rd, with a lecture on "ETH2.0 Ecology". We invited Mako, head of imToken's business operations, Qiu Xiaodong, head of the Chinese market of Spark Mining Pool, Li Zongcheng, CEO of Timestamp Capital, and Helen, a reporter from Babbitt Beijing Station, as the moderator.

The following is the essence of the whole sharing.

1. There can be many Ethereum 2.0 shard miners, and the requirements are very low. Mining nodes can run on ordinary laptops or even mobile phones. It is designed to allow retail participation with minimal offline penalties. ——Mako

2. Layer 2 of Ethereum can carry more data and information, which greatly improves the performance of Ethereum. This change excites me the most. ——Qiu Xiaodong

3. The transition from PoW to PoS stage is slow, and there will be a mixed operation stage of PoS and PoW. Ethereum GPU miners should gradually decrease. This may be an opportunity for graphics card miners. The mining machine is mining coins, and the mined coins can also generate additional income. ——Qiu Xiaodong

4. Ethereum 2.0 will lead the development of public chain technology from three aspects: Plasma, Casper, and Sharding (sharding). Compared with other projects, Ethereum has invested more manpower and capital in these three directions, and has manpower and capital advantages. ——Li Zongcheng

6. Users who want to participate in Ethereum 2.0 Staking need to consider carefully, and may be locked for a long time. Of course, there will be third-party financial DApps that can solve the liquidity problem. ——Mako

7. If the market value of the public chain that has been launched exceeds BTC in the future, the most likely one is Ethereum. The public chain that can carry more people and support a larger number of transactions will have a larger market value. ——Li Zongcheng

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Mako：Ethereum 2.0: Gradually advancing through four phases

Q1: What is Ethereum 2.0? What changes are worth looking forward to? What is the biggest uncertainty?

• Ethereum has set 4 stages, frontier, homeland, metropolis and tranquility. Currently in the metropolis phase, Serenity is Ethereum 2.0. Its biggest change is the conversion from PoW to PoS, in addition to supporting sharding and new virtual machines.

• Ethereum 2.0 has planned several stages, but it belongs to parallel development, as follows:

• Phase 1: Also known as phase zero (developers like to start counting from zero), the beacon chain introduces the consensus layer. Currently, 8 teams are independently implementing the first phase. The beacon chain will be a brand new PoS block chain, users can use their wallets to participate in Staking mining to obtain income.

• At present, the phase 0 research work has ended, and it is expected to participate in Ethereum 2.0 Staking mining in October. 2.0 Mining is very interesting. There are two types of miners. The beacon chain must be a professional miner. There can be many shard miners with very low requirements. Mining nodes can run on ordinary laptops or even mobile phones. It is designed to allow retail participation with minimal offline penalties.

• Phase 2: Sharding, introducing the data layer, this stage is just a trial run of the sharding structure, rather than trying to use sharding to expand Ethereum.

Phase 4: Tuning and optimization of this new world computer.

Qiu Xiaodong:Vitalik said he sees no current unresolved research challenges. In terms of research, it is mainly how to implement it more elegantly, occupying less code and involving fewer edge cases. The philosophy of Ethereum 2.0 design is to keep it as simple as possible.

Qiu Xiaodong:The most anticipated change is that layer 2 of Ethereum can carry more data and information, which greatly improves the performance of Ethereum. This is what excites me the most.

Li Zongcheng:

Ethereum 2.0 will lead the development of public chain technology from three aspects.

The first is Plasma, the time is to be determined. The main idea of ​​Plasma is to provide a model that can execute off-chain transactions while relying on the Ethereum blockchain to ensure its security. Allows the creation of "sub" blockchains attached to the "main" Ethereum blockchain, which is equivalent to doing technical exploration on the second layer network.

The third is Sharding, and the sharding roadmap (twice the ETH2.0 roadmap) lists seven stages. Only phase 0 has a clear specification, which is regularly updated. Phase 1 specifications are much less stringent and precise. After Phase 1, the roadmap is transformed into a list of goals, not a technical document.

At present, most public chain projects are innovating in these three directions. Compared with other projects, Ethereum has invested more manpower and funds in these three directions, and has the advantages of manpower and funds.

Advancing PoS, where will Ethereum miners go?

Qiu Xiaodong:Q2. Will the miners of Ethereum gradually decrease or fall off a cliff? Can the security of the original Ethereum chain be guaranteed in this process?

Qiu Xiaodong:

The biggest uncertainty of Ethereum 2.0 is where the computing power of a large number of GPUs will go. In addition, the governance and economic model of Ethereum’s PoS route has not been fully determined so far, so various things may happen to PoS public chain governance.

Miners may panic, or they may be encouraged, because many miners are also ETH holders themselves.

The security of the original Ethereum chain will be somewhat related to the economic model of ETH2.0, but from the current point of view, the self-adjustment ability of the PoW system is quite strong, so we are not too worried about the security of the original chain.

Qiu Xiaodong:Q3: Xinghuo Mining Pool is currently the largest computing power mining pool in Ethereum. How to deal with the Ethereum 2.0 era?

First of all, it is impossible to give up the PoW business. We will definitely support more PoW public chain projects with technical strength, value, pursuit, and potential, so that the GPU computing power withdrawn from Ethereum can be mined. Secondly, we will preach to Ethereum PoW miners and guide them to participate in the ecological construction of Ethereum PoS, because the mining pool will face the exponential growth of users. In fact, Spark Mining Pool has already started the staking business.

Qiu Xiaodong:Q4: In October this year, Ethereum is expected to undergo an Istanbul upgrade. Will the upgrade go smoothly? How does it affect miners?

In a system as complex as Ethereum, changes to the rules must be made carefully and carefully. The so-called EIP is to change the rules of Ethereum, which is strictly a manifestation of the maturity of Ethereum. So far, no objections have been heard. The upgrade is also expected to have no impact on miners. The ProgPoW proposal that has been heatedly discussed will not be included in this upgrade because the audit report has not yet been completed. Proposals for fee reforms were also not discussed in detail.

Qiu Xiaodong:Media Observation Group Lianwen Pan Zhixiong: How can ordinary users become verification nodes in Ethereum 2.0?

The PoS ecological threshold for ordinary users to participate in Ethereum will be very low, as long as 32 ETH can be used as a node. The specific technical details and rate of return have not been disclosed so far, so I am looking forward to the Devcon held in Osaka in October, and I would like to hear from the foundation to learn more about the implementation details.

According to current estimates, Ethereum PoS is more friendly to ordinary users, and it is hoped that more and more participating nodes will be involved. However, due to the characteristics of the lock-up period, there are professional third-party financial solutions, and the future efforts of Defi and large nodes to reduce the lock-up period are worthy of attention.

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Mako：Detailed explanation of Ethereum 2.0: How can the two "ETHs" live in peace?

Q5: During the conversion process of Ethereum 2.0, what should we do with the thousands of DeFi ecosystems on Ethereum 1.0? They seem to have no way to build on the new chain (beacon chain), but the ETH on the old chain is constantly being pumped (pledged)?

Phase 2 of Ethereum 2.0 allows the deployment of smart contracts. For DeFi developers, this phase is the only way to build DApps.

There is currently no detailed implementation plan on how to migrate Ethereum 1.0 accounts and contracts to Ethereum 2.0. The known method requires a hard fork on the Ethereum 1.0 chain to transfer the account and contract state root of Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0 to realize the migration. That is to say, assets and DApp contracts on 1.0 can be directly mapped to 2.0. But in the Ethereum 2.0 era, the 1.0 and 2.0 phases will run simultaneously. Users will lock the Ethereum in the Ethereum 1.0 verifier contract to participate in Ethereum 2.0 mining, which is equivalent to destroying the Ethereum 1.0 Ethereum and converting it to Ethereum 2.0 . So the old chain is not blood drawn, it is destroyed directly, and then new ether coins are issued on 2.0.

Mako：In a sense, the transformation process of Ethereum 2.0 Staking is also a kind of DeFi deployed in 1.0, but the Ethereum locked by users cannot be circulated in Ethereum 1.0 in the future.

Q6: In the future, within a period of time, will there be two tokens based on the original chain ETH and the beacon chain ETH at the same time? Can they be converted directly in the wallet? Will there be 2 prices?

Ethereum 2.0 phases 1 and 2, the conversion from PoW to PoS ETH is one-way. The PoS chain is actually a simulated Ethereum. In addition to staking and income, it cannot transfer money and has no other uses. The PoW chain is the real ether. currency, so that it does not split the market.

Phase 3 of Ethereum 2.0 allows PoS chain ETH transfers. In this stage, the accounts and contracts of the PoW chain will be mapped to Ethereum 2.0. The PoW chain Ethereum will be phased out and automatically converted to the PoS chain Ethereum on the same Ethereum address.

Mako：So in my understanding, two prices will not be generated. Although there are two types of Ethereum at the same time, the two types of Ethereum cannot be used or transferred at the same time. Let me emphasize that the stage 1 I am talking about here is not counted from 0.

Q7: During the conversion process of PoW and PoS, there may be an impact on the currency price? What if a certain percentage of the currency has never been transferred to the Ethereum 2.0 chain?

Depositing 32 ETH into the contract is to become a verification node, and you need to run the verification node yourself. This has high requirements for users, but I have also tested it before. The whole process is simple, and a laptop is enough. You can also try it on the 2.0 testnet now. I think there will be a lot of professional verification nodes in the market to help ordinary users complete Staking, and they can entrust any amount of ETH to verification nodes for mining, such as the Spark mining pool.

It can be said that users who want to participate in Ethereum 2.0 Staking need to consider carefully, and may be locked for a long time. Of course, there will be third-party financial DApps that can solve liquidity problems.

Ethereum 2.0 plans to transfer the accounts and contracts of Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0 by simply copying the state root of Ethereum 1.0, so there is no need to worry about the problem of no transfer.

Ethereum will face the problem of oversupply for a period of time, 1.0 mining can get ETH, 2.0 staking can get BETH.Li Zongcheng:

I think there is a high probability that PoW’s ETH will continue. Mako thinks that the existence of two sets at the same time will cause chaos, but I don’t think so. The name of the BTC fork is changed to BCH and BSV, and not many people confuse it. After the ETH hard fork, there will be two sets of ledgers at the same time. It is difficult to unify everyone's will for any one thing. The blockchain gives another group of people the possibility to insist on themselves.

Ethereum 2.0, will it be the accelerator of the market explosion?Q8: Both Ethereum and Bytom are native PoW public chain projects. Ethereum is turning to PoS, and Bytom is advancing towards PoS with a multi-side architecture (main chain PoW, side chain PoS). How are they similar and different?

Li Zongcheng:

The difference is huge. Bytom is exploring in another direction to improve the scalability and commercial ease of use of the public chain. Bytom’s main chain PoW mechanism remains unchanged, and the side chain built on the main chain adopts PoS, which uses PoS on the second-tier network. mechanism for innovation. Ethereum is the consensus mechanism of the main chain to make changes. The use of PoS is different.

PoS has certain advantages over PoW. PoW does not have the possibility of being directly combined with large-scale commercial use. In the future, the blockchain will be applied to more scenarios and let more people use it. It is difficult to rely on the PoW mechanism. But the advantage of PoW is that it can well guarantee the security of the ledger and cannot be tampered with. The combination of different public chains with PoS is more about taking advantage of the efficiency of PoS to improve the performance and scalability of the chain.Q9: Can Ethereum lead the next bull market?

Li Zongcheng:

If the market value of the public chain that has been launched can exceed BTC, it is most likely to be Ethereum.

I am optimistic about Ethereum, the main reason is that BTC is a store of value and its status is similar to that of gold. Ethereum is more like a securities infrastructure, because most Tokens will still be issued based on Ethereum, which will allow Ethereum to carry more users and richer assets. For transactions, if the user scale of Ethereum exceeds that of BTC, the market value will also exceed that of BTC.

If newcomers want to get ahead, they can't rely on old projects, they can only rely on new projects. All the firsts are waiting to be surpassed. If it is not Ethereum, there must be other projects whose market value exceeds BTC. As a leading blockchain investor, you are constantly looking for such possible projectsQ10: It is said that Polkadot, Cosmos, Binance Chain, and Libra will all pose a threat to Ethereum. What do you think?

Li Zongcheng:

There is a lot of uncertainty in the future. Investors need to make plans for high-probability and high-odds events. Only investing in a certain public chain is too much of a gamble.

Compared with Ethereum, Polkadot and Cosmos have logical upgrades. Contracts on Ethereum are generally simple contracts with 300 to 500 lines of code, and it is impossible to quickly develop other blockchain projects based on the development framework of Ethereum. Both of these two public chains propose a set of development frameworks, which can not only support more complex contract codes, but also make the development of blockchains more convenient.

There is a distinct network effect in the blockchain, and it is difficult for a leader in a certain segment to be surpassed by a latecomer in the same direction. There are obvious differences between these new projects and Ethereum. Exploring different application scenarios of blockchain technology is not a life-and-death relationship.Media Observation Group Xiao Cong Zhao Laojun: The new protocol of Ethereum 2.0, the upgrade system originally scheduled to start in 2020 has recently been reported to be delayed, what is the biggest difficulty encountered? How do you see challenges?

Mako：Li Zongcheng: