Ethereum upgrade tourism map: an article to sort out the upgrade history and future planning
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, Author: Pan Zhixiong, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Ethereum has undergone 8 network upgrades in history. When we try to map the block height of each historical fork to a linear time axis, we will find that the frequency of Ethereum network upgrades is gradually decreasing, and even in 2018 there was no upgrade. This article does not try to explore the reasons why the upgrade frequency of Ethereum is decreasing, but the most intuitive guess is that it may be because the Ethereum Foundation needs to devote part of the engineers' energy to the development of 2.0, or it may be because as the platform matures , there is no need for high-frequency forks. After all, it is very troublesome for the nodes running the network, and the client needs to be upgraded.
The latest hard fork upgrade was completed at around 8:00 on December 8th, Beijing time, code-named "Istanbul", activating 6 EIP proposals to upgrade the network. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said that after this upgrade, ordinary transactions per second (TPS) will increase by about 5% to 10%, and for Layer 2 technology Rollup, it can be increased by about 4 times.
As we all know, the entire project of Ethereum is gradually promoted in four stages, which are divided into: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three phases can be called Ethereum 1.0, while Tranquility can be called Ethereum 2.0. Since 2.0 is a very large project spanning several years, it is likely that 1.0 using the proof-of-work mechanism and 2.0 upgraded to proof-of-stake will coexist for a long time and evolve separately.
Of course, the core technology of 2.0 is sharding technology, which can greatly improve the efficiency of the distributed system of Ethereum. However, some other important technologies are also arranged in 2.0, which can further improve the performance of the network, such as eWASM. Therefore, this kind of technology may also test some features on the 1.X chain before the 2.0 is fully launched.
This article sorts out the roadmap pages in the official documentation of Ethereum, trying to mark the impact of each upgrade in history. Of course, since the most important significance of most upgrades is to improve the basic technical capabilities or performance of the network, the content of this part will not be expanded in detail.
Ethereum upgrade tourism map: an article to sort out the upgrade history and future planning
Some things worth noting:
Ethereum did not plant a "difficulty bomb" when it went live on the mainnet;
Ethereum did not undergo network upgrades in 2018;
After Istanbul, the upgrade code of Ethereum will be named in the order of Devcon;
Future development cycles will be centered on the EIP, and only when the EIP is mature enough will it be considered for merging into upgrades.
Ethereum upgrade tourism map: an article to sort out the upgrade history and future planning
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Ethereum "frontier", a decentralized software platform
Frontier Thawing: Planting a Difficulty Bomb
On September 7, 2015, after this upgrade (that is, block height 200,000), the difficulty adjustment mechanism will be introduced, also known as the "difficulty bomb", and the difficulty of computing power in the network will be experienced in about a year. Exponential growth, so it is guaranteed that Ethereum will undergo another hard fork within the next year.
The purpose of introducing the difficulty bomb is to provide a mechanism for the network to migrate from PoW to PoS. When the computing power is too high for miners to dig out any block, it will be the best time for the network to switch to PoS.
Ethereum upgrade tourism map: an article to sort out the upgrade history and future planning
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DAO Fork (DAO Fork): Birth of ETC and ETH
This is why Ethereum has two networks. In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization project called The DAO raised $150 million by issuing tokens. In June, The DAO's contract was exploited by hackers, and tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH were stolen by unknown hackers. There are still many details about the subsequent development of this incident. All in all, most community members believe that a hard fork should be carried out to get the stolen funds back from the hackers. So on July 20, 2016, a hard fork named "DAO Fork" was carried out. There are also many community members who do not approve of this behavior. They believe that the decentralized blockchain platform should not carry out any human intervention, and the transactions that have occurred cannot be revoked. The divided community resulted in two networks following the hard fork, Ethereum Classic, where the hackers still hold funds, and Ethereum, where the stolen funds have been returned to investors.
Tangerine Whistle: Mitigating DoS Attacks
Since September 18, 2016, the Ethereum network has been attacked by individuals or teams, and the network has been blocked by a large number of unfinished transactions, similar to a denial of service attack (DoS). Therefore, the Ethereum Foundation plans to conduct two hard forks to completely solve this type of attack. The first hard fork will focus on addressing the most urgent network health issue, namely underpriced opcodes. The second hard fork will focus on secondary priority issues, such as attackers flooding with a large number of empty accounts, which may increase the size of the blockchain ledger unnecessarily.
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Spurious Dragon: Completely solve the attack
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On October 16, 2017, the hard fork included 9 improvement proposals. In addition to low-level updates related to opcodes, smart contracts, etc., the "difficulty bomb" was postponed to a year and a half later, and the block reward was reduced from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. Block generation times approached 30 seconds before dismantling the difficulty bomb.
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The territory of the Byzantine Empire during the Paleolio dynasty, around 1265 AD
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Ethereum upgrade tourism map: an article to sort out the upgrade history and future planning
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Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire, 1572
Ethereum upgrade tourism map: an article to sort out the upgrade history and future planning
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Users and developers have found that the block generation interval of Ethereum has been slightly increased recently, which will lead to a decrease in the TPS of the Ethereum network. Ethereum developers discussed, and some people proposed to carry out a hard fork code-named "Muir Glacier" at block height 9,200,000 to remove the difficulty bomb, which is expected to occur around December 31, 2019. According to data from developers in the discussion group, Ethereum's block generation time will continue to increase until the difficulty bomb is removed, and may reach 25 to 30 seconds around January 6th.
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Starting from this version, the upgrade codename will follow the order of Devcon, the Ethereum developer conference, and the first Devcon 0 was held in Berlin. In fact, many improvements were planned for "Istanbul" before, but due to various reasons, some of the improvement proposals that did not have time to be put in Istanbul will be moved to "Berlin", and there are 8 EIPs that are temporarily accepted.
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The first (Devcon 0) in Berlin with Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood in the middle
At present, in the official documents, the upgrade codes of these two times are mentioned, and any other information has not been discussed. However, the official mentioned that the future development cycle will be centered on EIP, and only when EIP is mature enough will it be considered for merging into the upgrade. And will prioritize "on time" and "small" over "delayed" and "large".
