Ethereum 2.0: five major misunderstandings clarified one by one
Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain news (ID: chainnewscom)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Chain news (ID: chainnewscom)
, Author: Trenton Van Epps, translation: Lu Jiangfei, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Ethereum 2.0 has attracted the attention of the blockchain industry, but the outside world has also misunderstood it. This article selects the five most common misunderstandings and clarifies them one by one.
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The picture above is probably your expression: Confused
As you probably already know, Ethereum 2.0 (hereinafter referred to as "ETH2") will be launched this year. Maybe you’ve seen quite a few talks from Devcon V, or Etherscan, Bitfly, or Alethio’s creation of block explorers for new testnets. That's right, Eth2 is launching!
However, as the bear market in cryptocurrencies fades, a slew of misconceptions has surfaced. I collected some of the most common misconceptions, as well as related background, and made some corrections and provided some resources.
These misunderstandings mainly include:
"Eth2 will never start";
"There will be two ETH tokens after the fork";
"All decisions on Eth2 are made by Vitalik Buterin alone";
"Eth2 is a complete solution to the many challenges faced by Eth1".
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Misreading 1: "Eth2 will never start"
According to every indicator we have, Eth2 will launch in 2020. The code for the deposit contract has just passed the formal verification of Runtime Verification, which means that the code is ready to be deployed on the main network. The Ethereum 2.0 clients Prysm, Lighthouse, and Nimbus have been iterating on the longer-running testnet and will switch to the mainnet specification recently.Every week one sees innovative client optimizations, larger testnets, and a growing community of stakers.
Ethereum has come a long way since its re-architecture in mid-2018, but the timetable is set. The most optimistic estimate of client developers is that "Phase 0" will be launched in the summer of 2020:Attestant.io said in the article
Mentioned by Paul Hauner at 43 minutes on the Into the Ether podcast
"Just in the middle of the year"
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Misreading 2: "Eth1 will be deprecated immediately after upgrading to Eth2"
Eth1 will coexist with Eth2 for at least a short period of time, after which the two protocols will merge. The merge includes the historical blockchain state, the DeFi apps built on it, and all your NFT (non-fungible token) crypto art.image description<->What will happen to the confluence of assets? The picture above shows the phased scene
Eth2 has been split into several phases. During these phases of research, development, and deployment, Eth1 will be happily running in the background. However, at some point, as the various stages reach maturity and are deployed, the state of Eth1 will be fully integrated into the Eth2 system. Ethresear.ch has some recent proposals on how to achieve this, such as:
"Early ETH1
Eth1 will be fully integrated into Eth2 only after all options have been thoroughly studied and the pros and cons of each have been weighed. It's also a reasonable, safe-thinking way to do it. On the contrary, some people try to compress the timetable for some arbitrary switching point, which is not good.
There are many benefits to a phased implementation: First, encapsulation of code into discrete modules allows for better risk management. Researchers, client deployers, and auditors can easily analyze the architecture of the protocol in a manageable evaluation method; secondly, in this way, research, deployment, and testnet can be advanced in parallel, so that the community-oriented mainnet can Start faster.
In fact, we’re already seeing the benefits of this approach: Prysmatic Labs and Lighthouse both have Phase 0 public testnets, and Phase 1 and Phase 2 research is racing ahead.
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Misreading 3: "There will be two ETH tokens after the fork"
In the long run, there will only be one asset in the end. All ETH in circulation today will eventually exist on Eth2 as a "first class citizen". As mentioned above, once Eth2 is stable enough and the combination of the two protocols is ready, the convergence of the two will happen someday.
Most ordinary users don't need to worry, and don't be tempted to buy any tokens like "ETH 2". In a recent Eth2 AMA Q&A, Vitalik Buterin summed it up nicely by saying:
Proof of Stake: How I Learned to Love Weak Subjectivity (2014)
Some people believe that the Ethereum network upgrade means that there will be two tokens coexisting. Most "hard forks" are network upgrades, usually resulting in better functionality for developers or a mitigation of attack vectors. Occasionally, a contentious fork splits the community, sometimes resulting in the continued coexistence of the two cryptoassets. One of the most famous examples is the hard fork that occurred in 2016 and split the community into two camps, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
However, the transition from Eth 1 to Eth 2 will not result in a similar split, as proof-of-stake (PoS) and sharding have been expected from the very beginning:
On Settlement Finality (2015) mentions sharding as a possible path
The most critical part is that there were some hiccups during the transition period after the beacon chain launched but before Eth 1 was integrated. During this time, ETH (referring to the asset) will function similarly, but will be split into two domains. Over time, they will eventually converge into the same fungible market.
Here's a rough sketch of the base asset transition:
Sometime thereafter, "Phase 0" goes live, and depositors become "stakers": they participate in validating the blockchain and are rewarded for newly issued tokens on Eth 2;
"Phase 1.5" refers to a mechanism that makes Eth1 a shard, avoiding some of the more complex trade-offs that would be caused by some finality tool (Eth2 lending security to Eth1) ) or some two-way bridge (to transfer assets between ETH's PoW and PoS chains). A stateless model for this process is currently under study.
Before Eth 1 and Eth 2 are fully integrated, third-party institutions (exchanges or staking service providers) may create derivatives and IOUs to facilitate ETH liquidity, because some ETH is pledged and some is temporarily illiquid. However, third parties create derivatives of real ETH, not real ETH. It remains to be seen how and to what extent this will all play out, given the difficulties and need for trust.
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Misunderstanding 4: "All decisions of Eth2 are made by Vitalik Buterin alone"
Vitalik Buterin is indeed a key figure, but Ethereum has many, many researchers and contributors to move the project forward. For example, Danny Ryan (Danny Ryan) played a very important role as a coordinator, bridging the gap between researchers and client implementers. Over the past year, the group involved has been expanding to include groups such as:
8 active client implementation teams
TxRx Research
Stateless Ethereum Research
Robust Incentives Group
Quilt team
Ewasm team
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Pictured above are some of the ETH 2 implementers at the Ethereum Interoperability Conference on September 19, 2019, without Vitalik. Photo: Danny Ryan
“In fact, as a developer community, we try to operate as openly as possible, such as developer calls, communicating issues on GitHub, formal escalations, informal escalations, and many other channels to encourage participation. Everyone is welcome to participate, And it's true that there are many people involved. We support organic growth while being careful not to give too much control to any one party. In a way, we operate in a similar way to Linux, which has come to dominate computing globally status."
In the words of another Ethereum co-founder, Joe Lubin:
If Vitalik Buterin Takes a Break...the Ethereum Machine Will Keep Running
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Misreading 5: "Eth2 is a complete solution to many challenges faced by Eth1"
Eth1 brings to the surface some important issues that are at the forefront of distributed systems, trustless applications, and community solidarity. Eth2 will bring many benefits, but permissionless public chains still face a similar set of challenges. It doesn't matter if it's version 1.0, 2.0, or even 3.0. Therefore, the community still needs to pay close attention to the following aspects:
Developer Lesson: For builders, please make the transition from Eth 1 to Eth 2 as smooth as possible. What's the best way to ensure developers have the tools to continue creating and innovating? Please be sure to fund infrastructure on Gitcoin!
Network upgrades (fork coordination): This requires the consistent participation of community members who are both knowledgeable and committed to bringing network upgrades to life. Eth2 will have a hard fork, at least initially, and this fork and continuous improvement path need to be managed. Of course, these will all stabilize over time.
Community cohesion: the community is not a whole, each part has its own preferences. Which Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) should be included? Where should resources be directed? It's all part of the collaborative community maintenance effort that Ethereum lives on.
Smart Contract Security: Like it or not, smart contracts written by people will have flaws. eWASM promises to enable the use of other languages in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), but it also means that better framework practices are needed to deal with this broader field.
Onboarding: The strength of the community, and by extension, the protocols it spawns, depends on the capabilities it provides for core updates. So perhaps there is a need for an extension of the mandate by organizations like ETHGlobal.
DApp User Interface: What can we learn from end users? We need to continue to push the unmanaged product, so that new users will be introduced to the product. Eth2 introduces finality to the protocol, but this will have no effect on the vast majority of end users.
Sustainability of public goods: Funding builders is still very important. Eth2 needs to have a mechanism that provides support for all implementation teams, perhaps through voluntary client fees. Please support open source projects on Gitcoin!
