The Ethereum hard fork upgrade is coming soon, here are a few things you must know
In the past more than a year, "Ethereum 2.0" has been concerned and mentioned by people, and has become a long-term hot topic. As time approaches, the next upgrade of Ethereum has been put on the agenda. According to the tweets released by the core developers of Ethereum, the long-awaited Istanbul hard fork will be carried out at the block height of 9069000, and according to the block generation time estimate of Ethernodes.org, the expected hard fork upgrade time is December 7:32 am on the 8th (the specific time will vary according to the speed of block generation).
As the blockchain platform second only to Bitcoin in the field of cryptocurrencies, Ethereum (ETH) has been one of the most concerned projects since its launch. Every technical upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain has attracted much attention, and this Istanbul upgrade is considered more critical because it is related to the transition of Ethereum to the 2.0 stage.
Many people may have heard or seen the words "Ethereum 2.0" and "Istanbul upgrade" frequently recently, but they still don't quite understand what's going on, what it has to do with us, and the importance of block chains. What impact does the chain field have, and so on. Today we will answer these questions one by one.
What is "Istanbul" upgrade?
The "Istanbul" upgrade is an upgrade that was originally included in the technical route of Ethereum, but because of technical problems, the originally planned upgrade time has been postponed.
We know that after the official release of Ethereum, the founding team divided the development route of Ethereum into four stages: Fronter (border), Homestead (homestead), Metropolis (metropolis) and Serenity (quiet), each stage will pass hard After four stages, Ethereum will complete the transition from the PoW consensus mechanism to the PoS consensus mechanism.
At the beginning of this year, Ethereum completed the Constantinople hard fork upgrade, which is the last upgrade of the metropolis phase. This time, with the upcoming Istanbul upgrade, Ethereum is about to enter a quiet stage.
Every upgrade of Ethereum adopts and implements the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP for short) proposed by some communities. The Istanbul upgrade includes 14 EIPs, of which 6 proposals will be implemented in the first upgrade of Istanbul on December 8. The main contents include: introducing sharding technology; measures to reduce GAS costs; improving the chain with the privacy coin Zcash Interoperability; smart contracts that allow for more creative functionality. The remaining 8 proposals still need to be discussed and deliberated by the core developers, and will be implemented in the subsequent Berlin upgrade (scheduled for January 2020).
In terms of operation, regarding this upgrade, Ethereum users or ETH holders do not need to perform any manual operations, unless the exchange or wallet service provider prompts that other operations are required, otherwise only node operators, miners and other developers Only personnel need to perform operations such as updating the Ethereum client.
Ethereum 2.0 is coming
Ethereum 2.0 is coming
According to the latest news, the preliminary client of Ethereum 2.0 is being tested, and a public test network will be released soon. The test network will need to run for at least three months. If all goes well, it will be officially launched in the first quarter of 2020.
Ethereum 2.0 is the version of the network that will replace the current Ethereum, and it is an upgrade that will be completed during the quiet phase. All upgrades will be carried out in stages. At the same time, Ethereum 1.x will continue to improve to ensure the subsequent operation of the original PoW chain. (ps: Ethereum 1.x is the code name for a series of comprehensive upgrades of the Ethereum mainnet in the near future). The main technologies involved in the Ethereum 2.0 phase include sharding, Casper, state rent, and eWASM (Ethereum-flavored Web Assembly) virtual machine.
Among them, the core concepts are the concepts of "sharding" and "beacon chain". Let's see what they mean.
Fragmentation is a traditional conceptual expansion technology based on dividing the database into several fragments. It divides the database into multiple fragments and places these fragments on different servers. Based on sharding technology, dividing the network into shards will allow more transactions to be processed and verified at the same time.
For example, if the existing Ethereum blockchain is like a busy highway, the toll booth on this highway has only one toll gate. The result of this layout will be traffic jams as people will queue up to pass the only toll booth. The blockchain after the introduction of sharding technology is like adding 15 or 20 toll gates to the highway, which will greatly increase the speed of cars passing through the toll gate. Therefore, the implementation of sharding technology will significantly increase the transaction speed of the blockchain.
The Beacon Chain is a new chain designed by Ethereum, which can be regarded as a "centralized" blockchain. The designers of Ethereum 2.0 hope that the beacon chain will become the center of the Ethereum 2.0 network, playing the role of coordinating hundreds of other Ethereum blockchains (known as shards) in the envisioned Ethereum 2.0 network, and becoming a guarantee The security of all other shards and the root of authentication for shards.
In the beacon chain, there will be a new token called BETH, where the conversion ratio of BETH to ETH is 1:1. When Ethereum 2.0 is actually launched, the ETH of Ethereum 1.0 can be directly converted into BETH. There are two ways to create BETH: 1. Obtained as a reward for verifying the beacon chain (and shards after phase 1); 2. All Ethereum 1.X users can use 1 Ethereum 1.X contract The unit price of ETH to buy BETH.
On the beacon chain of Ethereum 2.0, as long as you have 32 BETH, you can apply to become a "node" to mine. Of course, you can also entrust your BETH to others to "mine". Since the quantity threshold is not high, ordinary people can also apply to become nodes, which provides a certain support for "decentralization".
What will Ethereum 2.0 bring?
Most people pay attention to the upgrade of Ethereum 2.0, mainly because it involves their own interests, or they want to know what impact it will have on the blockchain network.
First of all, according to V God, the transition to Ethereum 2.0 only takes 6 hours, but the actual implementation may take about two years. During this time, the Ethereum Foundation will be working on the implementation of phases 0-2. It will start with the introduction of the PoS (Proof of Stake) algorithm, the Ethereum 1.0 network will work as before, but funds cannot be withdrawn at this stage.
From the user's point of view, for most users, apart from the change of the consensus mechanism and the improvement of network fluency, they may not feel much difference in other usage processes. While very different code paths are used to package and propagate transactions, the functionality provided by the network is the same.
In addition, although it will be upgraded through a hard fork, there will be no community splits or any candy. Ethereum 1.0 will live "inside" the 2.0 ecosystem for a while. But after the transition is over, the Ethereum 1.0 network technically still exists, but it is worthless; when the difficulty bomb explodes and the ice age comes, the 1.0 network will eventually die.
In terms of macro impact, V God believes that Ethereum 1.0 is a group of people trying to build a world computer in a disorderly manner; while Ethereum 2.0 will be a real world computer.
Overall, Ethereum 2.0 will enable the Ethereum network to achieve a higher degree of scalability and decentralization. There are several important changes:
1. The Ethereum network consensus mechanism shifts from PoW to PoS
Now Ethereum adopts PoW (Proof of Work Consensus Mechanism). V God believes that PoW will only become more expensive and less efficient. After Ethereum turns to PoS mechanism, miners will no longer be needed for mining. PoS will The way to measure voting rights has shifted from the size of computing power to the size of currency holdings, that is, people with more assets have greater voting rights. The mining ecology on Ethereum will undergo a huge change, and the rights and interests of miners will be directly affected, and the way of participating in the verification of blocks may need to be changed.
2. Network performance and efficiency are greatly improved
After the introduction of sharding technology, it will greatly improve the speed and throughput of ETH transactions, and finally achieve the purpose of improving efficiency and increasing the scalability of the network. In addition, Ethereum 2.0 plans to use eWASM (Ethereum WebAssembly) instead of the EVM virtual machine, which will directly support multiple programming languages at the same time, greatly improving work performance and solving efficiency problems.
3. Bring a new economic model and provide dynamic benefits
After the launch of Ethereum 2.0, due to the adoption of the PoS mechanism, the Staking (pledging economy) model will also be opened. As mentioned earlier, in order to be eligible to perform the functions of a master node, a validator needs to meet the requirement of pledging ETH tokens and must have 32ETH on the network. According to Ethereum’s new economic model, validators are expected to earn between 4.6% and 10.3% per annum.
All in all, if Ethereum 2.0 arrives smoothly, the Ethereum blockchain will usher in a new comprehensive breakthrough, and we may see a series of "chemical reactions" brought about by it. After that, it may lead us into a new stage in the blockchain field, and it will also usher in new opportunities and challenges.
