Looking at the footprint of Ethereum from previous upgrades
Editor's Note: This article comes fromEthereum enthusiasts (ID: Ethfans)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Ethereum enthusiasts (ID: Ethfans)
With the completion of the Constantinople upgrade in February this year, Ethereum has stepped on the threshold of the Serenity (also known as Ethereum 2.0) stage, and only needs to go through a series of hard forks and phased upgrades ( Including "Ethereum 1.x") can be achieved. However, in order to better understand the goals of Ethereum 2.0, we first have to look back at where we started. Here is a chronology of events in Ethereum, reviewing important planned internal (external) hard forks and upgrades in the history of Ethereum to prepare for the next stage of development.
Olympic | May 9, 2015
The Ethereum blockchain was officially launched in July 2015. And the finishing touch before that is Olympic - the ninth and final open testnet for a proof of concept (PoC), allowing developers to explore in advance how the Ethereum blockchain will work after launch. Vitalik announced that it will issue a total of 25,000 ETH to reward developers who stress-test the network. The test requirements were clear: try to overload the network and "crash the state of the network" to see how the protocol would handle excessive traffic. Developers need to test four aspects: transaction activity, virtual machine operation, mining mechanism, and general penalty mechanism.
Frontier | July 30, 2015
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Block Reward: When miners successfully mine a block on the Ethereum blockchain, they will receive a reward in ETH. In the Frontier phase, the block reward for miners is 5 ETH per block.
Block Reward: When miners successfully mine a block on the Ethereum blockchain, they will receive a reward in ETH. In the Frontier phase, the block reward for miners is 5 ETH per block.
Gas: In the early days after the release of Frontier, the gas limit for each block was hard-coded to 5000gas. To put it bluntly, this means that there will be no big moves on the Internet. This allows a buffer period for miners to start working on ethereum and for early users to install the client. After a few days, the gas cap is automatically lifted and the network can start processing transactions and smart contracts as planned.
Canary contracts: Canary contracts are incorporated into Frontier to inform users which chains have been or are vulnerable to attacks. Canary contracts are assigned a value of 0 or 1. If the contract is assigned a value of 1, the client can recognize that this is a faulty chain and avoid this invalid chain when mining. Essentially, these functions of the Canary contract allow the Ethereum core development team to stop operations or transactions when there is a problem with the network. In the early stages of Ethereum, the Canary contract was an extremely centralized but indispensable protection mechanism.
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Homestead | March 14, 2016
The Homestead upgrade, the first hard fork of the Ethereum network, was implemented on March 14, 2016 at block 1,150,000. In general, the Homestead upgrade mainly includes three important improvements to Ethereum. First, it removes the canary contract, removing the centralized part of the network. Second, it introduces new code in Solidity, Ethereum's contract programming language. Finally, it introduces the Mist wallet, which allows users to hold/trade ETH and write/deploy smart contracts.
The Homestead upgrade, the first hard fork of the Ethereum network, was implemented on March 14, 2016 at block 1,150,000. In general, the Homestead upgrade mainly includes three important improvements to Ethereum. First, it removes the canary contract, removing the centralized part of the network. Second, it introduces new code in Solidity, Ethereum's contract programming language. Finally, it introduces the Mist wallet, which allows users to hold/trade ETH and write/deploy smart contracts.
EIP-2: Homestead Core Upgrade
The Homestead upgrade was one of the first Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to be implemented. EIPs refer to recommendations made to the community, and once they are endorsed, they are incorporated into network upgrades. The Homestead upgrade contains three EIPs:
EIP-2: Homestead Core Upgrade
EIP 2.1: Increase the cost of creating a smart contract through a transaction from 21,000 Gas to 53,000 Gas. Previously, creating a contract by contract (the preferred method) was more expensive than creating a contract by transaction. Due to the increased gas cost of creating contracts through transactions, EIP 2.1 incentivizes users to revert to creating contracts through contracts.
EIP 2.2: "All transaction signatures with s values greater than secp256k1n/2 are considered invalid. ECDSA restores precompiled contracts unchanged and accepts higher s values; in cases where contracts need to restore old Bitcoin signatures, etc. , this feature comes in handy.” [source]
EIP-7
EIP 2.4: The incentive for users to create blocks with a higher difficulty value is removed, thereby increasing the probability of mining blocks. This upgrade stabilized the block time at 10 seconds to 20 seconds and brought the entire network back to the target block time of about 15 seconds.
EIP-8: Future-Proof Upgrades
EIP-8: Future-Proof Upgrades
EIP-8 is a proposal for future-focused network upgrade program improvements. This improvement ensures that all client software on the Ethereum network is resilient to future network protocol upgrades.
In addition to the planned Ethereum upgrade and hard fork, there was an unplanned DAO event worth remembering. In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO raised $150 million in a token sale. In June, The DAO was hacked and $50 million worth of ETH was stolen by an unknown hacker. Most of the participants in the Ethereum community decided to perform a hard fork to restore the stolen ETH in the wallet and patch the vulnerability. However, the hard fork has not been unanimously approved by all participants in the community, and some participants continue to mine and trade on the original chain. The original chain of unrecovered stolen ETH is called Ethereum Classic (ETC), and over time, its security has gradually decreased, and the difficulty of mining has also decreased. Most of the community and core developers continued to work on the forked chain - the stolen ETH returned to their original holders - which is now known as the Ethereum blockchain.
Metropolis: The Byzantine Fork | October 16, 2017
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EIP 100
Metropolis: The Byzantine Fork | October 16, 2017
EIP 658
The next step on Ethereum’s roadmap is called Metropolis, and it will take place in two phases: Byzantium and Constantinople. The Byzantine fork was activated at block 4.37 million in 2017, which included the following 9 EIPs:
EIP 649
Adjust the block difficulty evaluation formula to include uncle blocks in the reference range. The new formula makes the issuance rate of Huobi more stable and ensures that the issuance rate cannot be forced to increase by manipulating uncle blocks.
A "difficulty bomb" is a mechanism that, once activated, increases the cost (i.e., the difficulty) of mining a new block until the difficulty reaches a point where it becomes impossible to mine a new block. Once this difficulty is reached, the Ethereum network will "freeze". The difficulty bomb was originally incorporated into the Ethereum network in September 2015 to help the Ethereum network transition from PoW to PoS. Once the PoS mechanism is implemented, miners can theoretically still choose to support the old PoW chain, which will cause the community to split and produce two independent chains-one maintained by stakers and the other by miners. maintain. In order to prevent this from happening, the difficulty bomb mechanism came into being, which will make the mining efficiency lower and lower, and finally ensure that the entire network completes the transition to the PoS mechanism without hard forks. In this proposal, the difficulty bomb (also known as the ice age) will be postponed for one year, and the block reward will be reduced from 5 ETH to 3 ETH.
Details of the remaining Byzantine Fork EIPs (140, 196, 197, 198, 211, 214) can be found here.
Metropolis: Constantinople | February 28, 2019
EIP 145: Bitwise Move Instructions
EIP 145: Bitwise Move Instructions
EIP 1052: Smart Contract Verification
Bitwise move instructions were added to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). These instructions allow the bits in the binary information to be moved to the left and to the right. This improvement means that bitwise move operations for smart contracts will be 10x cheaper.
EIP 1014：CREATE2
EIP 1052: Smart Contract Verification
EIP 1283：SSTORE
A smart contract is able to verify itself by checking another smart contract's hash. Before the Constantinople fork, the smart contract must extract the complete code of another contract for verification, which will consume a lot of time and resources.
State channels just got easier to implement. The state channel is an Ethereum expansion solution based on off-chain transactions.
Reduce the Gas cost required for SSTORE operations. This move makes multiple update operations in transactions less expensive.
EIP 1234: Block Rewards and Suspension of the Difficulty Bomb
Consists of two parts: reducing the block reward and suspending the difficulty bomb.
Block Reward Decrease
Difficulty Bomb Suspension
EIP 1234 postpones the activation of the difficulty bomb for another twelve months, when another vote will be held.
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