Opinion: Consensus is not just about agreeing, it's about changing things
Editor's Note: This article comes fromDecentralized financial community (ID: China_DeFi), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Decentralized financial community (ID: China_DeFi)
Decentralized financial community (ID: China_DeFi)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.Infura handles approximately 10 billion code requests per day, providing developers with a way to connect to the Ethereum network without running a full node. Yesterday, Infura's downtime caused by Geth's silent upgrade quickly spread to the entire Ethereum community. This is the most serious service interruption in its four-year operation. The affected products include major exchanges, And the Metamask wallet, an important entry point for DeFi.,as well asThe review of this matter should not be limited to a single technical issue, or the analysis of Infura. Rather, it should be seen as an opportunity for a groundbreaking system to refract as it evolves:Patching a groundbreaking system: The biggest manifestation of a system that starts from scratch and enters the middle stage is the emergence of various patching opportunities, such as our previous article
"Summary: New overseas DeFi projects in October, more asset management strategies are coming! ",as well as，"ETH Technical Team: Phase 0 of ETH2, it's time to start"。
They are all fulfilling the promises of this system, such as faster chain speed, safer liquidation, better DeFi income...
More convenient infrastructure: Influra will still be the most popular node provider tomorrow, because they do make users feel more convenient. Compared with writing smart contract data analysis by themselves, developers prefer to use the graph; compared to running an ETH2.0 validator by themselves, users prefer eth2.0 one-stop revenue service. see two articles
"The Graph Decentralized Goolge+AWS, Processing 4 Billion/Month Requests for Uniswap and Others"
"ETH Pledge Mining is Coming! ETH2.0 User Pledge Operation Manual"
On November 11, the Ethereum network had problems due to a flaw in the consensus mechanism.
A node running an older version of the geth service would become an orphaned chain, with knock-on effects for all applications that depend on such a node.
Most users only became aware of the issue when the Infura API was down. Infura is the largest node provider on the Ethereum network, and they provide tools and infrastructure for some of the most used web3.0 applications and exchanges such as Metamask, Uniswap, and Binance.
Infura’s service downgrade suggests that Binance either relies on Infura or has to run outdated nodes, neither of which are suitable for such a large transaction volume.
/########## BAD BLOCK #########//<…>//Error: invalid merkle root (remote: 57cc91ee8b91b956592a27b14386abc2aba723b5f4f9e5d3181ace6b5d3cd433 local: 1f9ee59bfa683a25c7a15b626995a3ad7c58c571b40df96eea31e5c5eed9732d)/
While it may seem odd that Infura isn't running the latest geth release, it makes sense for such a large operator not to jump directly into the latest release. Because without a hard fork, there is no compelling reason to switch from a stable working code to an unknown one.
Search and analytics engine Blockchair also ran into issues, tweeting the following:
We're having issues with our Ethereum explorer and are working on a fix. There seems to be a chain split and some nodes (both ours and some miners' nodes) got stuck on the split minority chain.
Blockchair CTO Nikita Zhavonronkov reported the following error received:
Two critical vulnerabilities were discovered in the geth network, both discovered by John Youngseok Yang (Software Platform Labs), who earned him 20,000 points on the Ethereum Bounty Program Leaderboard for this.
To avoid attacks, the consensus flaw was not discussed on Github, so the exact details of the vulnerability are not yet known. For those looking for more technical details, Mhswende said:
"will be explained in future articles or presentations".
To minimize disruption, Ethereum developers decided to hard fork. As Péter Szilágyi wrote on Twitter:
This is an "unannounced hard fork" (from bad chain to good chain). That said, silently fixing a bug that has been dormant for 2+ years is far less likely to cause disruption than raising awareness about it. We work hard to minimize potential damage.
For those affected by the Infura outage, this event should be a timely reminder to keep your nodes up to date. Because once you delegate your node to another party, they will be able to decide how to conduct business. Infura has been transparent about the whole incident and is clearly trying to fix things.
Infura is now back online. Infura's shutdown made many people realize how dependent we are on this single entity. This is a centralized service that acts as a gatekeeper to our decentralized system. Individuals and institutions alike need to consider their approach going forward.
Large exchanges such as Binance and Bithumb were forced to suspend ETH and ERC-20 withdrawals during the shutdown. We cannot depend on Infura to this extent. Since MetaMask relies on centralized node providers by default, the entire Ethereum network is instantly bleak, and the gas is reduced to only 12gwei.
This demonstrates an unhealthy dependence and clearly demonstrates the potential harm that such dependence can produce. Do we want our numbers to reproduce the same mistakes elsewhere in society, relying on centralized single points of failure?
We've built a free web, but handed it over to a small group of centralized authorities - Chrome, Safari, Brave. We cannot allow the same thing to happen to cryptocurrencies.
