Public chains have hard-to-read scriptures
Editor's Note: This article comes fromGolden Finance, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Golden Finance
Golden Finance
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
A few days ago, Medalla, Ethereum's new test network, failed in the verification process due to the low participation rate. Although this is just a small accident, it is also the test situation that the testnet hopes to appear, because the goal of the testnet is to test all possible dangers. But for investors who are walking on thin ice in the secondary market every day, they may be misunderstood as "Ethereum" is not good, the Ethereum team is poor, and so on.
Fortunately, in this period, the secondary market of ETH is doing very well, so the testnet has not affected outside comments.
The causes and consequences of this testnet accident are as follows:
Within a few minutes in the evening of August 14, the number of active verifiers on the Ethereum Medalla test network suddenly dropped from 22,000 to about 5,000, and about 80% of the verifiers in the network disappeared. After checking, the cause of the event is the problem of clock synchronization (clocksync), because the order of transactions in the network is confirmed according to the order of time, and the problem of clock synchronization will directly affect the verification process of the verifier.
When this problem was fixed, it caused another problem in the beacon chain: clients with wrong time were still producing valid validating blocks. That is to say, the beacon chain at this time is not confirming the longest chain according to the working principle of Casper CBC, but is constantly generating error blocks and forking.
At this time, we are faced with the double problem of the number of verifiers participating and the longest chain.
On the evening of August 18, Prysmatic Labs, the executive team of the Ethereum 2.0 client, tweeted an official announcement that the latest v1.0.0-alpha.23 version has been officially released. This release stabilizes the node validator sync process and has a number of critical fixes. At this time, if the participation rate of Medalla verifiers on the Ethereum 2.0 test network fails to pick up, redeployment of the deposit contract will be considered. That is to re-enable the deposit verification process of the 32ETH verifier.
Around the 20th, the Ethereum 2.0 testnet Medalla was up and running again. Subsequent operations are still under observation.
At this time, the Ethereum test network still needs to participate in more than two-thirds of the nodes and meet the ETH pledge amount required for startup.
Taking a comprehensive look at this testnet accident, if it is accurately expressed, this is not an "accident", but a normal test, just like the developer of Prysmatic Labs Nishant Das said: "This is very good for ETH2.0, because Finding bugs is the focus of the testnet.”
This is a process required for engineering development, and the implementation of Ethereum 2.0 adheres to many principles, such as multi-client testing and a more macroscopic PoS consensus model. On August 17, Vitalik said, "The implementation of Ethereum 2.0 is faster than expected. Much more difficult, but don't think there's anything fundamentally flawed, it's just a matter of time before the Ethereum 2.0 issue actually progresses very fast recently."
From the progress of Ethereum, we can see that a huge social organization experiment is in progress, not only the multi-team cooperation in technology development, but also the game about the interests of miners and developers within the ecology.
Therefore, if a public chain is developed from the beginning to the successful launch of the main network, it will achieve the expected goal of maturity. There are really many important nodes that need to be experienced in the middle. In the few years since cryptocurrency entered the public eye, various matters of cryptocurrency have gradually entered the public's awareness.
In summary today, most public chains can develop well, and they have overcome these issues.ETHIt includes very critical parts such as fundraising, teamwork, security risks, secondary market pressure, and development progress. In the development process of other public chains, such as Polkadot, COSMOS, ETC, EOS, Filecoin, etc., we can see the attempts and difficulties encountered by some public chains in seeking development.
In fact, it is not easy to build a public chain. If it is a PoW public chain, the focus is on how to obtain and increase the computing power, which needs the role of mining machine manufacturers and miners. To convince these people, it is necessary to build a A convincing network, such as belief in the fairness of the network and no gray areas, allows mining machine manufacturers to spend money on chips and mining machines, and miners are willing to spend money on mining machines to mine your tokens.
This process seems complete, as long as you are such a public chain, you can go through this process. But in fact, if the result is not the same as expected when progressing to each step, the team needs to have a certain amount of patience and perseverance, and keep repeating the parts that were not done well before.
In addition to PoW currency, more PoS is now. The PoS chain is relatively suitable for applications, and it can also be said to compromise on performance, but it is obvious that the compromise on performance will reflect difficulties from other angles. For example, governance participation is required, just like the launch of the Ethereum test network requires active deposit
, it took a while to deposit this amount. In addition, the client needs to be continuously run in addition to depositing ETH. The operation of this client also requires a certain development capability, and a single computing device and a centralized mining pool and mine. The stability varies.
Let's talk about a few public chain stories.
Let’s talk about Ethereum first. The DAO event of Ethereum split ETC. This is what the cryptocurrency community will definitely face. The main reason is that the PoW currency is difficult to roll back, so it has to be hard forked. This is because the PoW chain Compliance with the block rules is completely unchallengeable. For the PoS chain, if a huge problem is encountered, the community voting governance can make changes to certain problems.
At that time, Ethereum also encountered the problem that the Geth client of the Go language was attacked and crashed, but fortunately, there was Parity at the time to support the stability of the node, and the network was stable. This incident shows the diversity of clients. The importance of sex.
The ETC client migration event this month also illustrates the importance of client diversity. Previously, the ETC network relied too much on the OpenEthereum client, accounting for almost 80%, and the main developer of the client was Tang Wei, the developer of parity. When Tang Wei announced that he would no longer support ETC, it meant that due to a change in the main client, there would be Let the network be in the consensus stage of nodes, which is a good time for hackers to launch attacks.
This is why ETC has been attacked several times due to client migration. This seriously threatens network security.
Things are scary, but both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are old currencies and old communities, and the communities are still very stable. After several years of development, this is very important.
Ethereum and Ethereum Classic will not have a progress crisis that will cause a large-scale loss of trust in the community. For example, the COSMOS internal strife in early 2020 was not worth the candle.
Because the views of the COSMOS founder and the main technology development director are inconsistent, the community has doubts about the future development progress of COSMOS. In 2019, COSMOS has been praised to the sky, and the SDK has been cited by many people. Projects using the COSMOS SDK are scared.
In the past few months, the news of COSMOS has hardly attracted the attention of projects in China.
Compared with COSMOS, Polkadot is very stable, and the core should be relatively stable within the ecology, which is very much due to Polkadot's choice. Each option has its own characteristics. The first is to insist on Parity, RUST has a strong language advantage. The second three teams do core development, not many, and do not insist on such a grand client diversity and inclusiveness. Thirdly, the grants have done a good job of making good use of the funds and projects in the Chinese market. Finally, the progress of the project is relatively stable, which is due to the technology and model. There are also many announcements to the ecology, and it is relatively transparent. Gavin also writes articles by himself from time to time.
Of course, I think the most successful thing about Polkadot is that the network rhythm and design are relatively good. First push Substrate, open KUSAMA, and then prepare for the mainnet launch. Ecological projects help the parachain ecology. Finally, after the mainnet launch, the mainnet will be given to other parachain projects. Provide security.
It feels like all the projects set up Polkadot's plate together, and then the main network appears, and all the projects are backed by a big tree to enjoy the shade. The project is also closely related to Polkadot. However, only the cross-chain design is more suitable for this.
The advancement of Polkadot is like the feeling of constantly formulating some high-quality rules, and then selecting people to build a team together, while most other projects are in the mode of attracting customers and stocking development, but the only problem facing this mode is that DOT tokens are still It has not experienced a complete cycle of challenges, and there are few tokens circulating in the market, which have yet to be verified by the market.
In the example of the development of the public chain, EOS has to be mentioned. The election of EOS was a global sensation, but after the fireworks were released, it was a bit difficult to shine again.
If the election of EOS back then fully verified the community model of cryptocurrency, but because there was no ecological application support, it became a verification of the macro model. The dynamic changes of the macro model directly crushed the EOS ecology. The series uses resources as a flow element in the macro model to repeatedly pull new models. However, the market is not motivated enough and dies quickly.
