Dialogue with Guopeng: Polkadot and ETH2.0, who is the leader in the "new world" of blockchain?
The bell of the third decade of the 21st century has entered the countdown. Polkadot and ETH2.0, the two most concerned underlying protocols of the blockchain, are on the right track. On December 1st, the Ethereum Beacon Chain was launched, opening a new chapter in ETH2.0. Polkadot’s parachain auction will also start in the first quarter of 2021, and a new blockchain protocol will be launched soon. So far, the blockchain “new The world" has pressed the fast-forward button. Under the new situation, who is the leader between Polkadot and ETH2.0?
On December 10, the OKEx Intelligence Bureau invited Tan Guopeng, the founder of Ownbit, to have an in-depth dialogue on Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0.
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From my point of view, comparing these two projects, I think Polkadot will be far ahead of Cosmos in terms of technical foresight and overall community support. To some extent, we may see that Polkadot’s ecology develops relatively well later, while Cosmos-related cross-chains may gradually become less ideal. This is just my personal guess.
OKEx Intelligence Bureau: As a senior developer in the blockchain industry, from a technical point of view, which one will be more difficult to implement, Polkadot or Ethereum 2.0?
Tan Guopeng: From a purely technical point of view, or from a programmer’s point of view, the design of Ethereum 2.0 is actually more difficult. Why do you say that? As far as Ethereum is concerned, it is mainly a sharding function, which is a process of interconnection or interaction between various subsystems in the same system. Polkadot is actually a heterogeneous system, which is a process of mutual cooperation between multiple different chains.
From the current design point of view, the difficulty of Polkadot's multi-chain collaboration is actually less than that of ETH2.0, but this is just a simple technical evaluation. This question cannot be understood as Polkadot Not as technically difficult as ETH2.0.
What we need to understand is that their goals or functions are actually different. There are no other systems in Ethereum. What it does is the interaction between subsystems after different shards; while Polkadot actually calls cross-chains across different systems, and those systems interact with each other. In fact, there is no relationship in logic itself.
Another point is that there may not necessarily be such a problem in today's discussion, that is, no one has really analyzed "Are we really going to Ethereum 2.0?" The real sharding actually makes Ethereum become It is more complicated, so where is the necessity or logic of ETH2.0?
The collaborative relationship between Polkadot's mutual subsystems is defined at its design level, and different parallel lines need to interact with each other. But ETH2.0 is a shard purely for expansion. If there are not so many user transactions now, or if the performance of Ethereum is very good and can already carry the current transactions, it is not necessary to do ETH2.0. ETH2.0 does not add value to ETH itself, it is actually to solve a big pain point or problem of its own. Doing a good job of ETH2.0 does not mean that it will be better than ETH1.0, but that its throughput may be greatly improved.
So I personally understand that the technical difficulty of ETH2.0 is actually greater than that of Polkadot. Of course, another topic is the necessity of ETH2.0, just like we discuss the necessity of Bitcoin’s segregated witness, which actually exists. Some controversial. It’s just that Vitalik (the founder of Ethereum V God) has such an influence that no one may challenge or question it, and everyone has come to the ETH2.0 route. As for whether it will cause a fork between ETH2.0 and 1.0 in the future, it is actually still unknown, and it is also quite a risky thing.
OKEx Intelligence Bureau: Polkadot has many technical features, such as high customizability of Substrate, no-fork upgrade of on-chain governance, and unlimited scalability. Will these promote the future development of the blockchain industry?
Tan Guopeng: Substrate is a very good SDK. The Cosmos SDK mentioned earlier is also good, but with Substrate, this SDK will become more powerful. In fact, one of the characteristics of Gavin Wood’s team can be seen from some things made in the SDK. The pursuit of some technical details may be relatively extreme. A particularly big feature here is their extreme pursuit of indexing. , or the speed of the query. Their ultimate pursuit of performance can be seen that other SDKs will be far behind.
So Polkadot's biggest contribution to the entire blockchain, I think, is Substrate's SDK. I believe that many projects in the future will do their own development based on the SDK. Even if you don’t do Polkadot’s parachain, you can use it as an independent thing. It abstracts many things very well and helps you solve many problems. Fundamental issues at the blockchain level.
In addition, because of the design of Polkadot's own characteristics, new projects will be added to Polkadot's ecology to become parachains, or parallel threads, which will have more benefits. If you can't auction off a parachain, it's okay to create a parathread. So a good technical design can indeed help its ecological development to be more vigorous.
So my conclusion is that the role brought by the SDK itself is that more projects will be developed based on Polkadot and become parachains or parallel threads, thus making Polkadot a relatively central hub with many parachains around it. ecology.
OKEx Intelligence Bureau: Ethereum 2.0 will transform into a PoS proof-of-stake mechanism in the future, and Ethereum miners may face huge uncertainties. What do you think are the benefits of Ethereum switching to a PoS mechanism? Is it possible that the uncertainty in the mining industry will lead to another fork?
Tan Guopeng: This is a particularly good question. Regarding the PK between PoW and PoS, different people have different opinions. I believe that those who think PoW is better than PoS, there will be many people who think PoS is better than PoW.
Here I will share my own point of view, from the philosophical point of view of "the most streamlined beauty", I personally like PoW, of course this does not represent the current (at least the official Ethereum) point of view , We have seen various articles that think that PoS is better than PoW mainly from the perspective of some practicality, including some energy consumption, to sort out or talk about these issues. This one is actually not easy to say. What are the benefits of converting Ethereum to PoS? If you just want to list the benefits, there may be a bunch of them, but I think this is just a choice for them, and of course they can choose not to convert to PoS. Of course, when Ethereum was at 1.0, this was already a design in the roadmap to convert to PoS.
So if we look at it from the perspective of Bitcoin, the pure PoW working mechanism works quite well. The products operated by Ethereum 1.0 to now are also very good. I personally don’t see any disadvantages of some power consumption of PoW or mining competition.
For Ethereum, in fact, once it is converted from PoW to PoS, miners will also withdraw from the stage of history. Although you can also be called a miner when you transfer ETH for PoS, the nature of the miner is not the same. We cannot say that existing PoW miners have no problems, there will be some. But generally speaking, I think it is beneficial to the entire ecology. So I think this topic is a matter of opinion.
Regarding whether it will cause a fork, I personally feel that it is very likely to cause a fork. Although the influence of Ethereum, Vitalik or the entire technical route, in general, I think it may be good, but this will cause some losses to some existing miners after all. For miners who invest heavily in hardware, switching to PoS is definitely not a particularly good news.
The necessity of ETH2.0 has never been seriously discussed by anyone on the table, but I think it is particularly necessary to talk about it. There will be similar problems in Bitcoin. For example, the Bitcoin community will discuss why Bitcoin does not go to sharding or sharding, but expands in the same way, because Bitcoin will also have a big problem of expansion.
Regarding the entire sharding technology, including the development direction of the entire public chain, it is not a decision-making behavior of a company. Different people have different opinions on many things. It is difficult for you to decide at an early stage that this must be good, and that must be. No, there are many things that need to be discussed, and we have too few opportunities to discuss them now.
Should ETH2.0 be? My personal opinion is conservative. I agree more that ETH1.0 plus layer 2 is a long-term development plan, rather than turning it into a shard-based architecture like 2.0. In general, I think that the current direction of ETH2.0 led by Vitalik is wrong, but it is only my personal opinion, and there may not be too many people to respond or think about it.
OKEx Intelligence Agency: There are frequent security vulnerabilities in Ethereum DeFi contracts. What do you think about this issue? How secure is Polkadot-based DeFi?
Tan Guopeng: Contract security on Ethereum is actually one of the most important issues in the entire industry. This is because of the security issues caused by the flexibility of Ethereum's own smart contracts, which are often contradictory parties. Just like in Bitcoin, it greatly restricts the flexibility. You need to design a set of logic in some specified operation services. There is no such a complete programming method, so relatively speaking It will be much safer.
Producers engaged in programming related to Ethereum smart contracts will know that it is very flexible. It can be said that it is so flexible that it is beyond your imagination. Many things that cannot be realized in the traditional world can be designed in it. For example, before you may often You will hear new species such as "flash loans".
The second point is also because the technical level of the developers of the relevant contracts needs to be improved. We are now in an era of DeFi explosion. There are many projects that have rushed to the last contract for the sake of progress and time. The person who wrote the contract may not be very experienced, so many loopholes are often left, which is why it Another reason for the frequent occurrence of security vulnerabilities.
Polkadot will be much better than Ethereum in terms of security. But hearing this point of view, you may think that Polkadot is better than Ethereum, but it is not the case, but it sacrifices a kind of flexibility.
The basic cross-chain means we see in Polkadot, the transmission of messages between parallel chains, is actually not a method of contract invocation, not a Turing-complete programming method, but only in the prescribed Some interactions between messages, in this way, will greatly reduce flexibility. You have to call the interface that has been defined by the other party to do some things, so its security will be doubled, because it avoids some loopholes that may be caused by complex logic, and you cannot say who is good and who is bad, I think It is a different design, both have advantages and disadvantages.
So from the perspective of flexibility, we may see that the DeFi ecology on Polkadot may not be as prosperous as Ethereum. The multi-layered ones we see now, whether it is the design of nesting dolls or the design of flash loans, are all due to some special functions brought about by the flexibility of Ethereum smart contracts.
OKEx Intelligence Bureau: Gavin, the founder of Polkadot, believes that the future blockchain world should be "interconnection of thousands of chains" rather than "unification of thousands of chains". The former is advocated by Polkadot, and the latter is advocated by ETH2.0 Yes, how does Mr. Tan see the future blockchain world?
Tan Guopeng: I think Gavin's point of view is very correct, but it is a bit late. If Bitcoin is also based on Polkadot, Gavin's ideal will be realized. Now in the entire blockchain ecology, the proportion of Bitcoin is still very large, and it is not too much to say that it exceeds 50%. The scene of "chain interconnection" is greatly reduced. You think that if the most important person did not join in, even if the other people reunited, it would not be an ideal state to some extent, right? So Polkadot's Wanchain Interconnection depends on who everyone is? If the most important players, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are interconnected, then Wanchain Interconnection is of the greatest significance.
And "one thousand chains into one" cannot be said to be advocated by ETH2.0. ETH1.0 is actually a concept that advocates everyone to play on my ETH platform. The current status of the entire industry is actually that ETH has partially achieved its goal, because everyone has gone to the ETH network, and even Bitcoin has been transformed into wBTC or other BTCs for transactions on the Ethereum network, and its own master The net is even blocked to some extent.
So these two directions are different directions, but from the current actual situation, the direction of ETH seems to be a fact at present. And why are people more willing to exchange tokens on one platform and convert different tokens to ERC20? The main reason is simplicity, because everyone's protocol is the same on a platform, and some very simple and effective conversions can be realized.
For those chains in the ecology, Polkadot is a very big advantage. All the chains in my ecology have the possibility of mutual cooperation, so it realizes cross-chain. So how big Polkadot can grow in the future depends mainly on the quality and quantity of the parachains. The proportion of the entire blockchain, if more and more high-quality chains appear in Polkadot’s parachains, it may lead the development of the entire industry more and more, and everyone will rush to enter my blockchain. Otherwise, it may form an instruction, an independent subsystem, and other major chains have not been added to Polkadot, and they still stay in their own ways.
If I vote now, I am definitely more optimistic about the way of ETH, that is, everyone exchanges on my platform. But this kind of view may be short-sighted. It is just a current situation. Everyone is more willing to exchange on the ETH platform. So judging from the current situation, it is still very difficult for Polkadot to shake the status of ETH.
OKEx Intelligence Bureau: If the Polkadot parachain can be successfully launched next year, and its performance can meet the standards, will it pose a threat to Ethereum?
Tan Guopeng: I don’t think there is a project that can shake the status of Ethereum at present. Only Ethereum can shake its own status. What do you mean? That is, Ethereum 2.0 is indeed worth considering, unless it is a mistake in one of my own routes, which ruins my bright future.
At present, Polkadot's ecology and Ethereum do not have the strength to compete directly. From the perspective of leaders, they may be of the same order of magnitude, but for some current mainstream projects in the entire market, Polkadot Obviously an addition. The technical realization of Polkadot should be its biggest highlight, so it should not have too many technical problems, including the design of parallel chains and cross-chains. Even if it has not yet launched, it can be expected that it will definitely be a success of.
So for the biggest impact of Ethereum, I think Ethereum 2.0 has the biggest impact on Ethereum 1.0. After Ethereum 2.0, the system will become very complicated, and Ethereum 2.0 cannot solve some core pain points of Ethereum 1.0. What are the current core pain points of Ethereum 1.0?
If you go to play DeFi and use Uniswap, you will know some problems about early transactions. These problems may be the most real problems, because it involves the current unfair system of the Ethereum system. The unfair system is Impossible for long. There are some technical characteristics that lead to such unfairness. For example, the time for Ethereum to confirm a block is still relatively long, and the average time of more than ten seconds will leave some room for unfairness.
In this regard, Polkadot may be better than Ethereum, and Ethereum 2.0 itself does not focus on solving this problem in this area, and it cannot solve it. It is also such a level of Layer 2 that may be able to solve this problem. Layer 2 network to solve this problem.
Therefore, we talk about that if there is a project that will subvert Ethereum in the future, it must solve the pain points of Ethereum to be possible. Therefore, it is difficult for Polkadot to directly subvert ETH at this level. Of course, if Ethereum makes mistakes, other competing projects such as Polkadot may usher in better development, which is also very possible. Of course, we still need time to see these changes.
The following are questions for fans to interact with:
@北方来的鱼: At present, the performance of public chains such as EOS and TRON is not bad, and they also have their own DeFi ecology. Is it really necessary to redevelop a new blockchain? Is this a suspicion of reinventing the wheel ?
Tan Guopeng: EOS, I comment that it is a combination of gods and devils. What's the meaning? EOS is very advanced in many design aspects and has done a very good job, but there are also very big loopholes or very stupid points in the entire design. For example, its better design is that its confirmation speed is very fast. We can see that EOS can basically confirm twice a second. Such a fast speed is its great advantage. For the current Ethereum such as Front-Running (Preemptive trading) These problems basically do not exist in the ecology of EOS, because the time is too short, and it is impossible for you to do evil.
Its bad design is as prominent and obvious as its good design. For example, its entire node may involve too few, so that it is not very decentralized. We know that there are 21 large nodes, and the possibility of being manipulated to some extent is very high. In addition, many of the detailed designs in it are particularly unreasonable. For example, regarding the design of the CPU, some designs are endless loops, which should not happen. For example, you have a lot of EOS, but you don’t have a CPU. In this case, no matter how much EOS you have, you can’t buy a CPU yourself. This design is obviously unreasonable. This caused the entire network to be in an endless loop, unable to survive. This is a logical bug at the design level. Another point is that EOS is also the first system that requires others to help you create an account. This is a typical simplification into complexity, creating an account is more cumbersome, which will also curb its development.
Based on the above, EOS has obviously lost in this round of PK. Whether it can return to the battlefield and defeat the opponent again, I think the chances seem very small now.
TRON also has something worthy of recognition. For example, many of its foundations are based on EOS and Ethereum, but it has discarded the bad design of EOS. The current overall development of TRON, from my point of view, is actually better than the ecology of EOS. The reason for some good development is to benefit from the high fees of Ethereum, and some users will switch to TRON , Whether it is DeFi or some uses of USDT, there will be such a demand. Because there are these two projects, why do you need Polkadot? This may be a question for users.
I think this question is easy to answer. From the current point of view, there is no way for EOS and TRON to compete with Ethereum on the same platform, or hope to defeat Ethereum. And Polkadot may be much better than them at this level. It is at least a heavyweight with ETH. Whether it is technical strength, fans it has, or the overall advanced design, it is at least currently The only person in the entire blockchain ecosystem who can fight with Ethereum. Therefore, I think the Polkadot project is of course necessary, and it started relatively early, and it is not unique today. There have been related designs as early as 2017. It is a project that has been foreseen for a long time.
@Anonymous Fan: What is the layer 2 you mentioned earlier? How does it work? Why solve the fairness problem of Ethereum?
Tan Guopeng: Layer 2 is actually a very old concept, and it has been developed since Bitcoin. What we see now, for example, is Lightning Network, a typical layer 2 solution, which is also a direction that Bitcoin's Core team believes that Bitcoin should have.
For those who don’t know much about technology, you can understand it this way: whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum, they have a main chain, and your currency will enter another world after leaving the main chain, and this world becomes layer 2 The world of layer 2 and the world of the main network can be completely different. You can define the specific gameplay by yourself. Is it PoW or PoS? It will be all right. The interaction process in it can also be defined by yourself. The relationship between it and the main chain is an out-and-in relationship. In the end, you return to the main chain after finishing the work in layer 2. There is such an interaction between them. process.
Now it’s all a way of playing on the main chain. For example, if you use your ETH to buy a certain coin on Uniswap, then you initiate a transaction, but when you go to the network to trade one day, you explain that you need to use 10 ETH to buy it. For a certain currency, the transaction is sent to the network, because others can see it on the main network, then others can do something before you, this is what we call an early transaction. If you use layer 2, the gameplay is different. You may not send any transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. You will exchange your ETH into a type of token in the layer 2 chain, and then go to it. Send the corresponding transaction, whether it is buying a certain currency or selling a certain currency, why layer 2 can solve the problem of early transaction just mentioned, because the rules of layer 2 can be defined by yourself, for example, if you put the layer The block time of 2 is greatly shortened, which can effectively prevent the problems of early transactions, so there will be a greater fairness on layer 2.
The biggest advantage of layer 2 is that in addition to formulating some rules, in addition, once the ecology of layer 2 prospers, the pressure on the main network will be greatly reduced, and there may be no need for main network expansion, because many transactions will occur in layer 2 above. At present, everyone pays more attention and recognition to ETH2.0 than layer 2. The main factor is that layer 2 is not very successful on the Bitcoin network, but it cannot be denied because it is not very successful on the Bitcoin network. Possibility of success on the ETH network. The above is roughly the logic of layer 2.
@小思到: Do you think developers will like Polkadot's on-chain governance and fork-free upgrades?
Tan Guopeng: The governance function on the chain is not unique to Polkadot now, and basically all emerging projects will have it. At present, the main advantages of Polkadot may not lie in these two points of the questions raised by users. These points are of course good, including some natural on-chain governance functions, which are naturally good things, and developers naturally like such functions. But the core advantages should be more cross-chain, including such a recognition of the entire SDK of Substrate.
@阿烤哥: Hello, Mr. Polkadot. Polkadot's leading network Kusama has received a lot of attention recently. Do you think Polkadot really needs such a leading network?
Tan Guopeng: This is a very good question, and it is also a very controversial topic. Polkadot’s test network Kusama tokens are now listed on mainstream exchanges, and they also have very good prices. This is something that deserves everyone’s attention. As for whether the tokens of the test network should have value, this is also a matter of opinion. Everyone knows that Bitcoin is the oldest blockchain network, and there are many testnets in it. In the past, the coins of the Bitcoin testnet have also been traded on exchanges and have some value. But later, the core developers reset the tokens of the test network in order to curb such problems, so the test network may reset the tokens in stages, and then release a new version of the test network, the purpose is to curb the test Network tokens are traded and circulated.
Polkadot's testnet Kusama's token (KSM) can be said to be unprecedented and unprecedented (and there may be one). It is the first test network with large-scale transactions, and the main core reason is due to the limited resources of parachain slots. In the current design, Polkadot's first version of the parachain may have about 200 slots. If you can’t grab the top 200, you may need to use the testnet Kusama’s parachain slot. This is one of the core points why Kusama tokens are valuable. This is just a logical value Analysis, as to whether this should be the case, this is still a matter of opinion, and everyone can think about it separately.
