Towards Ethereum 2.0: What will the Istanbul upgrade bring?

Text | Lin Shuai

Trial | Yu Baicheng

In December 2019, the first event to receive attention in the blockchain field was the Istanbul upgrade of Ethereum. The Istanbul upgrade is the eighth network upgrade of Ethereum, and the latest Ethereum upgrade is code-named "Constantinople".

According to the latest news from ethernodes.org, the ETH network will undergo an Istanbul upgrade at block height 9069000, and the current block height is 9064936 (15:18 on December 7). According to the current block generation rate, Ethereum is expected to undergo the Istanbul upgrade at around 8:29 on December 8, and there are still about 17 hours before the upgrade. The specific upgrade time may vary due to the speed of block generation.

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After Ethereum was officially launched, it has undergone several upgrades. According to the plan of its founding team, the development route of Ethereum is divided into four stages, namely: Frontier (frontier), Homestead (home), Metropolis (metropolis) and Serenity (tranquility). Each stage will undergo an upgrade transition through a hard fork, and each stage of the upgrade is to introduce more features and fix problems.

Source: Compilation of public information on the Internet, 01 blockchain

Source: Compilation of public information on the Internet, 01 blockchain

Ethereum entered the first phase - Frontier (Frontier) began on July 30, 2015. This phase is mainly to run mining and exchange transactions, so that the community can run mining equipment, and also establish a test An environment for distributed applications (DApps). At this stage, Ethereum only has a command line interface and no graphical interface. It needs to be very proficient in the entire Ethereum model and have a good grasp of tools before it can be developed and used. Real ether can be mined from this stage, but the reward for each block is only 10% of the normal reward, that is, the reward for each block is 0.59 ETH. However, because the Ethereum version at this stage is very complicated, it is difficult for general miners to participate in mining, and developers are more involved in mining.

On March 14, 2016, Ethereum entered the second phase — Homestead — at block height 1,150,000 on the main network. This upgrade mainly includes several protocol changes: EIP-2 (major hard fork change), EIP-7 (Ethereum virtual machine update), EIP-8 (devp2p forward compatibility).

After the Ethereum protocol is optimized, the system is more stable and easier to use, and ordinary users can also start to participate in mining. Mining rewards have also been restored from 10% in the “Frontiers” phase to the normal reward level of 5 ETH per block.

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According to the Ethereum Istanbul upgrade announcement, the rule changes implemented in this upgrade are all defined by EIP (Ethereum Upgrade Proposal). The Istanbul upgrade includes 14 EIPs, of which 6 proposals will be implemented in the first upgrade of Istanbul on December 8. The key technologies involved include: the introduction of sharding technology; measures to reduce GAS costs; improvements and privacy coins Zcash on-chain interoperability; and smart contracts that allow for more creative functionality. The remaining 8 proposals still need to be discussed and deliberated by the core developers before being implemented in the subsequent Berlin upgrade.

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Source: Compilation of public information on the Internet, 01 blockchain

At the DevCon conference in November 2018, Ethereum researcher Danny Ryan listed five design goals of Ethereum 2.0, including decentralization, system resilience, security, simplicity, and durability.

Overall, Ethereum 2.0 will enable the Ethereum network to achieve a higher degree of scalability and decentralization. The most important change is to complete the conversion of the consensus mechanism from PoW to PoS.

Now Ethereum adopts PoW, that is, the proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Generally speaking, it is a system of more pay for more work. The more computational work you pay, the more likely you will be rewarded. The disadvantage of this mechanism is that the speed of processing transactions is too slow. The upgraded POS mechanism can improve transaction processing speed and save a lot of computing power consumption.

In terms of specific operations, according to the Ethereum Istanbul upgrade announcement, there is no need for any manual operations for Ethereum users or Ether holders, unless the exchange or wallet service provider prompts that additional operations are required. Node operators, miners, and other developers need to update the Ethereum client.

In addition, the last Ethereum Constantinople upgrade decided to postpone the difficulty bomb for one year, and after public discussion, the difficulty bomb of the Ethereum network will be postponed again.

The difficulty bomb has been a contentious area of ​​the Ethereum network. The so-called difficulty bomb means that when calculating the difficulty of mining, in addition to adjusting according to the block generation time and the difficulty of the previous block, a difficulty factor that increases exponentially every 100,000 blocks is added.

According to this calculation rule, as the height of the Ethereum block increases, the difficulty of block generation will also increase greatly, and it will be difficult for miners to dig out new blocks. The difficulty of mining becomes more and more difficult, and finally miners can hardly generate new blocks through mining. At this time, it has reached the stage called "Ice Age".

The reason why the difficulty bomb is added is to prevent miners from boycotting the conversion process from PoW to PoS. After adding the difficulty bomb, miners will gradually find that it is more beneficial for them to transfer to the PoS mechanism during the mining process, so they will gradually abandon PoW and complete the "gentle" transition of the entire network consensus mechanism.

But the reality is that the entire conversion process took far longer than the developers originally imagined. At present, PoW is still the main mining mechanism of Ethereum, and due to the existence of the difficulty bomb, the mining difficulty continues to increase rapidly. In order to ensure smooth network and system stability, the difficulty bomb can only be delayed again and again before the PoS mechanism is officially launched.