In the past five days, myself, our executive director Ming Chan, and several others from the Ethereum team and projects and companies based in Ethereum, in particular Manufacturer,, Channel / Dfinity And Consensys visited China and Hong Kong, where there has been a series of conferences and consecutive events, including the Blockchain workshop in Hong Kong from October 11 to 13 and the “”Blockchain first global summit“In Shanghai organized by our friends in Wanxiang From October 15 to 16, while continuing to work on our usual tasks for research, development, Devcon and administrative questions.
The two conferences have proven to be, at least in my own optimistic estimate, very positive signs of the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem. During the Hong Kong event, on the first day, we participated in semi-fermed sessions on issues such as decentralized governance, identity and reputation and regulatory compliance. Robin Hanson spoke of the subject of prediction markets as a form of “low-cost micro-government”: if there are situations where a legal process or arbitration is necessary in order to ultimately resolve disputes, use a prediction market to provide the result instead, only making the opportunity during the underlying arbitration mechanism. Anyone with private information is encouraged to participate in the prediction market: the parties to the dispute themselves, third parties involved and even companies like Google applying high-end automatic learning algorithms; In most cases, a result which precisely predicts the result which would be obtained by the court or the underlying arbitration system should be reached very cheap.
The following two days consisted of group discussions on technical and philosophical subjects, people discussing their own projects and the future of blockchains in fields such as the reputation and the Internet of objects. Ethereum has been mentioned several times – not by us marketing ourselves, but by many people who consider Ethereum as a valid technology on which to build their applications.
The Shanghai conference was just as impressive. It was also a two -day event, with the first day featuring speeches and public panels and the second day focusing on the sessions focused on the subject; Personally, I participated in the moderation of technical discussions on consensus and scalability. It was a fairly important event, perhaps the most important since the World Bitcoin Summit in Beijing which was my first experience with China more than a year before and, as happened during the same period in the West, the public has transformed to be more common: rather than employees of projects specific to Bitcoin (or even the intellectual, the cryptocurrency), we saw traditional representatives from major banks, civil servants, government administrators, intents, Huawei and others.
People seem delighted to see how they could adopt blockchain technology for their own use – and there was a lot of interest in bypassing Ethereum specifically. It is indeed true that there are legal restrictions, some fairly clear and some gray, limiting the adoption potential of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in China, but there is still no problem with blockchain technology. The days before and after the conference, we took the time to meet Wanxiang as well as the other groups of China with the http://ethfans.org/. We always determine how we can work with Chinese individuals and business and make Ethereum as useful as possible in what has become by buying power of power the greatest economy in the worldBut it is clear that the possibilities and the potential are excellent.
Research and protocol development
We have identified four key research areas concerning the underlying protocol which, in our view, represents the key steps on the path between Ethereum as it currently exists and cryptopia:
- ZK-Snark integration: Integration, whether by a new OPCODE or ideally by taking advantage of the existing EVM modular 256 -bit arithmetic, the capacity of Ethereum contracts to verify the succinct evidence of zero knowledge. Since the verification keys can be generated entirely out of chain, this is somewhat easier than it seems, although once it is implemented a little infrastructural work will be necessary to make it extremely useful. An initial objective will be to use it to implement a mixture of ultra-private parts as well as a reputation preserving confidentiality (“Here is a proof that I have a score of more than 250 according to the measurement of your reputation and using this set of data published on the blockchain, so you must trust me, but I will not reveal which Among the parties you should trust Falcon on Ethereum; Outside and outside the aforementioned conferences, we had productive conversations with some of the developers of these technologies on how to go ahead to achieve it.
- Casper: Ethereum stake proof algorithm now under development by Vlad Zamfir with the help of Lucius Greg Meredith, myself and several others. The key components include By-Block instead of a chain consensus and the concept of “economic consensus by bet” as a means of approaching de facto finality with an exponential speed rather than linear speed as is the case with proof of work. The objective is to combine a reduction in block time (my personal opinion is that 4 seconds will probably prove to be a good balance between safety and overconsumption of resources and the risk of centralization; VLAD is as usual more aggressive), much lower energy and energy consumption (and 10-100x lower anarchy price in general). Currently, Vlad and Greg are working on the official description and implementation of the non -economic part of the algorithm to mathematically prove the convergence properties, and the second step will be to optimize the economy.
- Scalability: Using a combination of rupture, random sampling, intensive sampling of Merkle and asynchronous proofs in order to increase the potential transaction flow of ~ 10-20 transactions per second to more than 100,000 (or, if super-quadratic versions are used, theoretically unlimited number). The basic concepts behind the scaling have been placed in stone for more than six months, and our research team is very convinced that the general approach is valid; What remains are the details exactly how to make optimal compromises that preserve as many features of Ethereum 1.0 as possible in an evolutionary context. A key design objective is to ensure that Ethereum 2.0 remains a superset of Ethereum 1.0; For example, synchronous calls must always be possible in a single fragment, although cross calls may require asynchrony. I plan to update My scalability paper To make it more targeted, readable and updated with the latest ideas in next month, although, in general, research on scalability is on the back burner until Casper is solidified.
- EVM upgrades: Martin Becze took the lead in exploration Weba researches As a candidate for an improved Ethereum virtual machine. Weba researches many properties with the EVM: the need to execute unreliable code, the need for the code to be very small and the need to have several compatible implementations, although it lacks gas counting. Weba researches can be used to create a just time compiler for EVM, considerably accelerating Ethereum JS implementation, and it can also be used as an option of virtual machine itself by adding a transformation step which adds a code subtraction instruction to the code before each jump operation. Opcodes environment as Blockhouse,, Sstoreetc. Can be abstract by transforming them into ABI on a generic foreign function interface (for example. Sstore (K, V) becomes FFI (0x55 ++ K ++ V) Or 0x55; would be the representative marker Sstore).
Aside from that, research questions remain on the “In addition” Middleware Ethereum, including chain services, decentralized governance, identity and reputation, the generation of random numbers, formal verification of solidity (we have found a talented team in London which is delighted to start exploring the subject) and the implementations of the prediction market, as well as “Besides what is more work (Eg. Deliberately undertaken a strategy to focus on the heart (and to do it in a very light manner).
Regarding Homestead, the family ownership milestone has always been somewhat arbitrary in its definition; Unlike Frontier, which is marked by a large and ceremonious launch of the blockchain, and Metropolis, which is marked by the release of Mist, Homestead has always been supposed to be the point where we spend “Ethereum is dangerous” in “Ethereum is somewhat sure”. In the past two months, we have published a portfolio, Alphas for the pruning of state trees in Pyethereum and CPP-Ethereum and the headers first synchronization in Go, improve solidity, very early in the “Light Ethereum sub-Protocol” (Les) and soon publish the 1.0 CPP-Etherum and Mix versions.
Our internal objective was to launch Homestead when the Frontier network has successfully executed without serious problems for 4 weeks (the “serious problem” threshold is demoted from the definition of the border of “consensual failure” to a more enlarged definition which is something like “a consensual failure or of the people who lose large amounts of money or semi-series network gliffes”); We plan to announce a more detailed strategy for Homestead soon, but it is enough to say that we are already mainly there.
Devcon is still scheduled from November 9 to 13 in London, and we can’t wait to see everyone there!
