A comprehensive understanding of Ethereum 2.0
Editor's Note: This article comes fromCrypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)Crypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)
ethereum network
, author: sheinix@The Startup, translation: Lisa Liu, reprinted with authorization by Odaily.
As early as 2013, Vitalik Buterin, a BTC programmer and publisher of BTC Magazine, published the "Ethereum" white paper. Ethereum's goal is to expand the application of blockchain technology beyond payments.
Ethereum programming language
Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain. Like many other blockchains, it is open source, public and has its own currency: Ether or ETH. Universal blockchain means having a decentralized platform that provides a programming language that developers can use to create smart contracts. Smart contracts run on every node of the network, making it possible to develop distributed applications (DApps). These Dapps inherit the salient features of blockchain technology, namely tamper-proof, transparent, reliable and secure.
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Ethereum programming language
Gas & ETH Price
Solidity is a "Turing complete" language, which means it has all the capabilities to develop complex use cases. In contrast, BTC's programming language Scrypt is not "Turing complete" by design. Solidity is the most popular programming language for smart contracts and every developer should study it if they want to start developing smart contracts.
Vyper is another programming language created by the Ethereum team that runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (“EVM”). It is designed to simplify the process of writing smart contracts while making them easier to read. Its key difference from Solidity is that Vyper does not include some object-oriented features, which makes Vyper safer because there is less room for developers to make mistakes and introduce bugs.
Gas is a unit of measure for the cost of executing a transaction on the Ethereum network. Every time a smart contract runs a transaction, Gas will be consumed. These Gas need to be entered into the smart contract when the transaction is run. The way to pay Gas is to use ETH.
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Problems and Challenges Facing Ethereum
The main problem Ethereum faces is scalability. The network is billed as a "world computer," but it can currently process only about 15 transactions per second, while private companies like Visa can process as many as 45,000 transactions per second. This is a problem that needs to be solved if Ethereum is to achieve mass adoption.
In addition, security has always been a big problem for Ethereum. Mainly because of poor development practices in some projects, leading to hacks and loss of funds. Ethereum needed tools to provide developers with better security in smart contracts without compromising its Solidity.
The price of ETH and the cost of Gas make the transaction process so fragile that in some cases it's not worth it. Especially for Ethereum validators, they currently have to spend a lot of electricity to run nodes and PoW consensus algorithms, and in the process, they don't get much in return.
The lack of public awareness and poor DApps user experience are problems that need to be solved in the future, which is the key to realizing large-scale applications.
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source: stateofthedapps.com
source: stateofthedapps.com
Ethereum development phase
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Block #0 — Frontier
Ethereum development phase
Block #200,000 — Ice Age
Ethereum's development plan is divided into four distinct phases. Each stage is aimed at introducing more features and fixing problems. Each step also includes "sub-versions", so-called "hard forks", which change functionality and features in a backwards-incompatible way.
Block #1,150,000 — Homestead
The following timeline is the originally planned phases of Ethereum development:
Block #1,192,000 — DAO
This is the initial development phase of Ethereum from July 30, 2015 to March 2016.
Block #2,463,00 — Tangerine Whistle
Ice Age is a "hard fork" that introduces an exponential difficulty increase to facilitate a smooth transition from PoW to PoS when everything is in place.
Block #2,675,000 — Spurious Dragon
The second phase of Ethereum was launched in March 2016.
Block #4,370,000 — Metropolis Byzantium
The notorious DAO case. It was a hard fork that compensated the victims of the DAO hack and caused Ethereum and Ethereum Classic to split into two opposing systems.
Block #7,280,000 — Constantinople
Another hard fork to change the gas calculation for certain I/O heavy operations and to clear the accumulated state after a DoS attack exploiting the low gas cost of these operations.
Block #9,056,000 — Istanbul
This is the third phase of Ethereum development, launched in October 2017. Byzantium is the first of two major forks of Metropolis.
Serenity — Ethereum 2.0
This is the second hard fork on the Metropolis phase, which was completed in February 2019. The hard fork also included other modifications to fix the security issue codenamed Petersburg.
This is another hard fork, scheduled to activate on December 4, 2019, that will include more security fixes and incentives to move from PoW to PoS algorithm.
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Serenity is the final stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Ethereum 2.0 - a new Ethereum blockchain, complete PoS integration, and introduce a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, among other changes in many details.
There has been a lot of discussion and rumors about when Serenity will go public. This massive phase will be divided into different sub-phases:
Serenity Roadmap
Phase 2: New Ethereum Virtual Machine eWASM (2021)
Ethereum 2.0
Phase 3: Continuous Improvement Continued Development (2022)
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Ethereum 2.0
The term "Ethereum 2.0" describes all the updates coming from Serenity that will make Ethereum more scalable, faster and the state of the blockchain better. As stated by Ethereum researcher Danny Ryan, the main design goals of Ethereum 2.0 are:
System resilience: the goal is to keep the system running normally even when nodes go down on a large scale or the whole network is divided and dismembered.
Security: The goal is to use encryption and design mechanisms to allow as many verification nodes as possible to fully participate in verification per unit of time.
Persistence: Try to choose quantum-safe components for your system. If components cannot be guaranteed to be quantum safe for a while, choose components that are easily replaceable. When there are quantum-safe components in the future, these temporary components can be easily replaced with quantum-safe components.
Decentralization: The goal is to allow ordinary laptops to process/verify sharding tasks with a complexity of O(1) with resources of a complexity of O(C) (including any system-level verification such as in the beacon chain verification). This will allow more low-end devices to participate in the network.
To understand how this all works, let's look at the details of each Serenity stage:
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Phase 0: Beacon Chain Beacon Chain
The beacon chain will be a separate blockchain from the Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm that will run in parallel with the main Proof-of-Work (PoW) Ethereum blockchain. Initially, for the sake of simplicity, the blockchain did not support smart contracts or accounts.
At the time of writing, Ethereum is using a "Proof of Work" (PoW) consensus algorithm, very similar to the one used by Bitcoin. In Ethereum, the name of this algorithm is Ethash. On the Beacon Chain, we will see a new PoS algorithm called Casper. The plan to replace Ethash with Casper has been delayed several times over the past few years, necessitating some intervention to defuse difficulties and delay PoW being forced out. Now we finally have the beacon chain.
According to the PoS consensus mechanism, the blockchain tracks a set of verifications, and anyone holding the underlying digital asset of the blockchain (in this case, Ether) can do so by sending a specific type of transaction to lock their ether into a deposit verify. Validators take turns proposing and voting on the next valid block. The weight of validator votes depends on the size of their deposit (stake). If a majority of validators reject the blocks they built, then validators risk losing their deposits. Instead, validators receive a small reward proportional to their stake for each block that is accepted by the majority. Therefore, PoS forces validators to act honestly and abide by the consensus rules through a system of rewards and punishments.
ETH2: The new Ether
Another feature of Phase 1 is the introduction of ETH2, a new asset validated on the new beacon chain. This new ETH2 will be created as a reward for validating transactions on the beacon chain, and any ETH1 can buy it. Initially, there was no way to take ETH2 off the beacon chain. If someone is going to be a validator for the new chain, they need at least 32 ETH to stake the original chain.
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Phase 1: Shard Chains
Sharding is a scalability technique that allows transactions to take place in parallel. This is to help scale transactions by dividing the network into shards, allowing the network to process many transactions simultaneously.
Vitalik Buterin expressed the following views on "fragmentation":
Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon Chain with an initial size of around 100. Validators will validate transactions from their own shards, and during the first phase, they will not approve any smart contracts, accounts, or assets.
While sharding will bring more scalability, there are some frustration points to consider. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes 51% attacks easier since they only require 51% of the computing power (or stake) rather than the entire network.
This technique can also lead to greater centralization, as each shard can be validated by a small set of validators. It will be very interesting to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attacks.
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Phase 2: New Ethereum Virtual Machine eWASM
What is EVM
All nodes on the Ethereum system need to run smart contracts to execute the final transactions on the blockchain. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) allows these smart contracts to be executed.
EVM is the heart of the Ethereum network and the core of smart contract deployment and execution. It can be thought of as a globally distributed computer containing millions of executable objects, each with its own permanent data store. Technically, it is a stack-based execution of machine language instructions. Smart contracts are written in a "high-level" language such as Solidity and compiled to bytecode for execution on the EVM.
One of the main problems with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With changes in PoS and sharding, transactions need to be processed in parallel, and the current EVM is not suitable for this.
New EVM
The new EVM is called eWASM, which stands for Ethereum WebAssembly. WebAssembly is an open standard that defines a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will provide better performance and will potentially support smart contracts, accounts, state, etc. on the new blockchain. The development of eWASM is currently in a very early stage, with a planned release in 2021. Currently, much research is still needed.
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Phase 3: Continuous Improvement Continued Improvement
"Continuous Improvement" is a code name that encompasses all future changes, fixes, and improvements of the preceding phases, and more that follow. Unfortunately, not much information is available about this phase, as it was originally planned to launch in 2022. What we do know is that the following technologies will be implemented:
lightweight client;
hypersquare chart;
create closer ties;
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What does Ethereum 2.0 mean for the crypto economy?
