Let V God tell you how to go about Ethereum 2.0
Editor's Note: This article comes fromBabbittBabbittkyle, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
, Author Babbitt Information Editor
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
On the afternoon of September 18th, the "Fifth Blockchain Global Summit" hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs came to an end. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, gave a keynote speech "The Block That Excites Me" as the finale guest. New Developments in the Blockchain Industry". Vitalik Buterin talked about a very wide range of content in this speech, which can be said to be comprehensive, including the upcoming progress of the blockchain industry, PoS, privacy, decentralized exchanges, wallets, etc., in one speech. Chain industry players bring so much information.
The following is the content of the speech compiled by Babbitt (slightly abridged):
Talking about PoS:
Let's talk about the progress of the blockchain industry (mainly Ethereum) in the next few months (3 to 6 months, or even 12 months). At least I think these things are very important. Starting with Proof of Stake (PoS), which everyone has heard many times. You will see these people are saying that what happened in PoS in the past year is very good, and it has finally developed from a concept to something that everyone thinks or wants to promote, and finally some progress has been made.
The Cosmos mainnet was launched earlier this year, which is very good. It runs on Tendermint, which is a new generation of PoS algorithm. Ethereum 2.0 is also an upgrade of the next Ethereum blockchain, which will include PoS, as well as expansion technology implemented by sharding. Sharding has actually been in development for years, and it's just a matter of months before it's ready to roll out. At the beginning of September, a working seminar was held in Toronto. The engineers of Ethereum 2.0, a total of seven teams, gathered in Toronto to bring together all the developers of Ethereum 2.0 clients to implement the common development specification. Let these clients communicate with each other, process each other's blocks, and jointly support the network. So there is still quite a lot of progress. Ethereum 2.0 has not yet been launched, but it is very interesting that it is now close to launch.
We not only regard PoS as a theory or concept, how the consensus mechanism can change and improve the efficiency of the blockchain is not just in the thinking stage. We also think about the challenges we face, challenges are not bad, challenges are inevitable. In any new system, it is inevitable. If you move from a paper system to a real system, there will always be some challenges. For the Cosmos network, there is a very interesting economic attribute, that is to say, validators can entrust tokens to him. Now these validators have started a price war, hoping to charge a lower price sincerely. People in the Cosmos community are not happy, because as the price war becomes more and more fierce, it is not good to stay online, so everyone starts to worry. This is an example of what PoS protocol developers need to think about, which is about the decentralization of Staking. Two years ago, we were only thinking theoretically, but now we can think about the extent of existence in the network. Ethereum 2.0 has not been launched yet, but its specification has been written. People have already started to do third-party analysis. Will the nodes operated in the future be profitable, to what extent, how to model, the cost of hardware, where is the income, how much is the cost, and under what circumstances? People will want to participate. People have started to give some feedback, and these feedbacks have also affected the details of our algorithm, and now we have reached such a stage. That is, the protocol is mature enough that we can see some specific challenges.
Talking about scalability:
In the past year, the scalability has been greatly improved. There are two expansion solutions, the first-level expansion and the second-level expansion solutions. For Ethereum, there is sharding technology, which is under development, and a sharded test network will soon be seen. At the same time, there are also two-layer expansion solutions. There are actually several kinds of two-layer expansion solutions, and they have reached this stage. At least a demo version has appeared on the Ethereum mainnet, the first two being STARK Plasma and ZK Rollup. When I participated in the previous roundtable forum, I talked about zero-knowledge proofs, SNARKs, which are new technologies. SNARKs did not exist three years ago, and STARKs did not exist six years ago. Now we have seen scalable solutions that use STARKs and SNARKs to prove that large transaction levels are effective. Why does it improve scalability? Because we don't let every node verify all transactions. In fact, these large transaction nodes can be proved by one node. This proof can be broadcast on the blockchain, and then there is a shorter, shorter Simple proof, every node on the blockchain can verify this shorter version.
For Ethereum, the current Ethereum network can handle up to 20 to 25 transactions per second. Any Rollup mechanism can theoretically process 700 transactions per second, if everyone uses it on the mainnet of Ethereum. In a few months, we hope to do the Istanbul hard fork, after which this number will increase to 3000 transactions per second. So these technologies all exist, and now there is a version that works and can be used.
Talk about application:
There has been a lot of progress in scalability, but what about applications? I won't talk too much about very specific applications, I really want to talk about things that are more relevant to users. Starting with the wallet, any user can interact with the blockchain through the wallet, and through the wallet, the user can verify himself to the blockchain. When we talk about blockchain applications, we will talk about some of its good properties, such as decentralized systems, trust mechanisms that do not rely on third parties, and can verify whether a certain behavior occurs on the blockchain. . You know who authorized the action and who took the action. All attributes are dependent on some type of mechanism, namely verifying who the user is. In the early years of cryptocurrency history, wallets were nothing more than private keys. Basically a wallet is a piece of software that holds the cryptographic keys used to sign each message.
There is a problem with the key of this kind of cryptography, the key is easily lost. 7 years ago, I wrote an article in Bitcoin Magazine that if a person has a wallet, the wallet is a private key. If a hacker controls this private key and then installs an application, the application will obtain the user's password, decrypt the wallet after obtaining the password, and steal all the user's money. This kind of attack is easy to happen, and the security on the computer is also a big problem. So holding your own password is risky.
One solution is centralization. If you don’t want to hold the private key, you can put it in a centralized wallet, or let the exchange hold your tokens, but there are also credit risks. So Mybitcoin, the first centralized wallet, was hacked two months later. We don't know if it was attacked, maybe the user decided or the owner decided to steal the money. With a private key, whether you hold a private key yourself or use a centralized method to store tokens is very dangerous, what should you do? A recent trend is smart wallets.
What does that mean? Your tokens or money are not controlled by passwords, money is controlled by a smart contract. This smart contract can implement very complicated conditions, such as how to spend the money in the account, how many signatures can be used, any two keys can spend money, one of the three keys is placed on the mobile phone, one is placed on the computer, and the other is written in Put it on paper and keep it at home. It could also be a document, kept by your friend. Another concept is social account restoration. A key can usually be exercised on behalf of the account. If the key is attacked or lost, some users will gather together, which can be organizations or five friends. Different settings are possible. These several keys can be aggregated to agree to change the user's primary key. If you lose your key, you can restore it. If attacked, it can also stop hackers. Here they have a system for restoring social accounts, and a mechanism, which is actually a mechanism for restoring social accounts.
Where those options didn't exist a year ago, there are now several solutions to choose from that get better and better every month. There are many projects working on this.
Talk about decentralized exchanges (DEX):
Someone tried to do token trading on a decentralized exchange (DEX), did anyone do it in 2017? Some people have done it, but the experience is not particularly good, it is very complicated. For example, if the interface is not working, you need to send five transaction confirmations before you can make a transaction. So it is getting easier to trade one asset in exchange for another, or your ability is getting stronger and stronger. Why is DEX important?
Decentralized exchanges make it easier to develop multi-asset applications and reduce the risk of hackers (if the smart contracts used are secure). Because there is no single entity that can steal coins from it, and anyone can participate without permission. Once the decentralized exchange is established, it can continue to operate. So other developers can rely on this infrastructure to make applications, and decentralized exchanges can really reduce the risk of centralized exchanges' power concentration.
Talk about privacy:
In terms of privacy protection, we have made huge progress, especially in zero-knowledge proofs. At the same time, significant progress has been made in the application of general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs. Ethereum mainnet has now started to have some type of on-chain privacy solution,
There are other, more powerful projects, already in development. It will be released successively over the next year.
DAOs have made great progress in the past year, including MakerDAO, MolochDAO, and Aragon. These DAOs are used for many purposes, such as sponsorship, charity, funding open source projects, and governance of decentralized applications. DAO had a big problem before, but the latest project mainly hopes to pay more attention to its security to ensure that everything is auditable and formally verified. So far it seems like the new generation of DAOs, indeed taking lessons from the original DAOs, is starting to create something more meaningful.
Experiment with financing methods for new public welfare projects. There is a platform called Gitcoin Grants, which uses a donation-matching mechanism and calls it secondary financing, an idea I proposed last year. Use it to create a decentralized community-driven mechanism for distributing funds to public projects that benefit from the entire Ethereum system. It has raised funds for three rounds now, and the operation is still pretty good. Of course, there are still problems, and one of the big problems, which we gradually realized, is bribery and collusion.
I blogged about this about six months ago, and it's called "On Collusion." I criticize the governance of the blockchain on the chain. I think most of the voting on the chain, because of this mechanism or this structure, makes it very easy for people with a lot of coins to conspire with each other, bribe each other, and vote for each other. Can get greater returns in the system. We did come up with some solutions. This is a blog I wrote four months ago. I hope that everyone can use cryptography, zero-knowledge proof, and multi-party computing to solve this problem, so that the voting infrastructure can be used in DAU and other fields, making the voting mechanism No one can know how other people voted. If no one knows how you voted, you have no way to bribe and no way to conspire with others. In this way, the economic model you want at the beginning can be obtained. The only result you choose in governance is in the agreement, and there will be no unpredictable results. Therefore, this is what the Ethereum Foundation’s zero-knowledge proof team is developing. . Can be used for securing voting mechanisms, building better DAUs and other things.
Talk about better financing:
The idea two years ago was, why not use smart contracts for better financing? You can reduce the misalignment of interests. So the money will not go into the hands of the developer, because the developer may take the money directly. Put the money on the smart contract, the smart contract has some rules, through which the money will be handed over to the developer in batches, this is DAICO, which I invented a year and a half ago, it is a new design. It integrates defi and compound interest rates, and calls it a project of public interest. I encourage everyone to take a look and read this article on the Internet. There are many interesting ideas in it. Basically, I can use blockchain technology and smart contracts to solve real-world problems.
what can we expect
In the future, it will be better and better, and more credible data sources are decentralized financial applications and other blockchain applications, which rely on external data, so credible external data sources are needed. We know that there are some projects that are already solving this problem, but with more and more data, these projects will be more useful in the future.
