Ethereum Fork Countdown

introduction

Recently, there have been a lot of voices about the fork of Ethereum. After all, the merger date is basically confirmed, and the ownership of the computing power of more than 800 T in the entire network is still in doubt. Even Bitmain was upgrading its own Ethereum mining machines a few days ago.

Yangyang’s interview on Weibo published the speech of Guo Hongcai, an older generation of Bitcoin player, about the fork in the community. It seems that he has confirmed that Ethereum will definitely fork, and the words revealed that this is a high probability event. Interestingly, Guo Hongcai has long been away from the sight of the market, and this time he seems to be prepared. I believe that he is not the only one, and there must be others trying to take advantage of this rare opportunity to plan to summon miners for a computing power fork.

The last fork that the whole network paid attention to was the battle between BCH and BSV, but it was Bitcoin. If Ethereum is really forked, it is not about computing power, but about assets. As the world's largest application chain, the initiative of ETH has already been transferred to the asset side, and they are the decisive key.

This is an article by BlockBeats in December last year. The content of the discussion is not outdated. I hope it can help readers understand what is happening in the Ethereum community.

The following is the text content

Anyone who sees the word "Ethereum 2.0" will think that this is an upgraded version of Ethereum, which is indeed the original plan of Ethereum. Like "Iron Man 2" must be a sequel about Iron Man. But perhaps, in the eyes of some people, Ethereum 2.0 is not as simple as a sequel.

"It's actually another new project." Brother T, a heavy participant in Ethereum, said, "It's not the previous Ethereum."

Such a view is not consistent with the current market sentiment.

The fifth-to-last week of 2020 will definitely be mentioned over and over again in the future review of the cryptocurrency field. During this week, Bitcoin, the largest market capitalization, refreshed its all-time high, and Ethereum, the second largest market capitalization, It also officially opened its next new stage - the 0th stage of Ethereum 2.0.

"Ethereum 2.0 is coming online quite quickly." This is the most consistent view on this upgrade. It is well known that the upgrade of Ethereum is not on time. The 0th phase was originally expected to be next year, but I did not expect it to start so soon.

The advance in time has brought a lot of confidence to the market sentiment. In the 0th phase, a start-up threshold of 524,000 ETH mortgages has been set, and the launch can only be launched if the requirements are met. As the price of ETH rises, the value of at least 32 ETH mortgaged by each node is close to the value of one Bitcoin, and the lock-up of more than 100,000 RMB does not affect the mood, and the start-up threshold is completed without resistance. As of December 8, more than 1.2 million ETHs have been pledged.

Technology, price, sentiment, confidence, Ethereum 2.0 looks perfect right now.

But the Ethereum community, it seems, is not so optimistic.

Fragmentation doubts

In the upgrade of Ethereum 2.0, there are two most recognizable changes: one is the change of consensus, from PoW to PoS; the other is the introduction of sharding technology to expand network performance.

“It was reasonable when we proposed the introduction of sharding technology at the very beginning,” said Uncle Miao, product manager of Spark Mining Pool, “but now we need to rethink this issue.”

At present, among the Ethereum community’s solutions for scalability, Rollup technology has the highest status. From the founder Vitalik Buterin to the ecological application team, everyone’s consensus is almost the same, and even the project party puts the focus on Rollup before Ethereum 2.0 . "We don't pay attention to 2.0 now, what we value most is Rollup." Yang Mindao, founder of dForce, told Rhythm BlockBeats.

Compared with Rollup, the status of sharding has been reduced from data execution to data storage, which is also recognized by Vitalik. In the Ethereum 2.0 core developer conference call in mid-November, the core developers discussed that: Ethereum 2.0 may temporarily shelve its second phase plan until the feasibility of the data sharding layer Rollup scheme is falsified.

In other words, Rollup has now been recognized as the most potential expansion tool for Ethereum. Everything should be developed with Rollup first. In case Rollup fails, consider using sharding for data execution. The current sharding function , just do data storage.

Legend: Ethereum 2.0 developer conference call minutes in mid-November 2021

"However, if shards are only used for data storage, then in order to solve the problem of data availability, the research goals and feasible solutions should be reset instead of directly using the shards that were originally used for capacity expansion." Uncle Miao proposed his own question.

Regarding this issue, the domestic Ethereum community once discussed with Vitalik, but the dialogue did not result, and the two sides did not persuade each other. After all, this is a problem of the magnitude of the project roadmap. It is impossible to discuss it clearly in a few words, and this problem is too far away. Ethereum 2.0 has just entered phase 0, and there are still several years before phase 2.

But now there is a closer and more thorny question than sharding: Will Ethereum fork if the consensus is replaced?

Legend: Vitalik expressed his views on forks in the community

Persistence of PoW

This is not a fork in the conventional sense.

"If the final fork really happened, then unlike the previous The DAO, it was not caused by an accident, it was caused by the roadmap." Another doubt of Uncle Miao is the change of Ethereum 2.0 at the consensus level: when Why use PoS when all technical improvements can be done on the basis of PoW consensus?

Vitalik's point of view is very clear, "Upgrading PoS is to improve security and efficiency." He responded in the Ethereum community.

Regarding this topic, there was a heated discussion in the community a few days ago. Similarly, the two most mainstream consensuses that are used by the most projects must have some places where they can compete with each other. "PoS must be more secure than PoW". Conclusion, not everyone agrees.

In Vitalik's plan for Ethereum 2.0, the Ethereum 1.0 chain (now the Ethereum PoW chain) and the Beacon chain will merge at a certain point. At present, the specific merger is only a proposal. The idea is roughly: everyone votes first. A block height. After this height, Ethereum 1.0 will stop tracking the status and start tracking the status of 2.0.

"What he said is very clear. In theory, as long as there are miners continuing, the Ethereum 1.0 chain will continue to operate without being affected." Uncle Miao explained.

In other words, according to this script, we will see two chains called "Ethereum" running at the same time, one using PoW and the other using PoS. This is not a regular fork, but judging from the results, it is indeed a fork . "I think the possibility is quite high." Yang Mindao said.

The current one chain will become two chains in the future, and now one ETH transferred to Ethereum 2.0 at a ratio of 1:1 will appear in the future. Two ETHs with different prices will appear, and now the huge Ethereum community will be divided into two.

A conventional fork requires computing power to make a choice, and the protagonist of the choice is the miner, and if there are really two Ethereum chains appearing at the same time, it is the overall ecology of Ethereum, the project party, that needs to make a choice this time. It is a user and an investor.

The choice of Ethereum ecology

DeFi projects have already accounted for half of the Ethereum ecology, but the foundation of DeFi projects is the assets on the chain. "The agreement party mainly follows the asset party." Yang Mindao explained the views of the DeFi project.

The so-called asset side refers to on-chain assets such as USDT and USDC. The mortgage lending ecology of DeFi is basically based on the asset side. For example, mortgage USDT to lend other currencies. There is no doubt that the DeFi protocol must follow the asset side. But from the perspective of the asset side, this seems to be a problem.

Let's take USDT with a current market value of nearly 20 billion US dollars as an example. It is impossible for the issuer Tether to directly announce that the issuance of USDT will directly double due to the emergence of another Ethereum chain. If Tether allocates more than 10 billion US dollars of ERC-20 USDT to On the two chains, the ratio of distribution needs to be considered, and the assets on the Ethereum chain are not only USDT. Most protocols support multiple assets. If USDT chooses Ethereum 1.0 and USDC chooses 2.0, it will be difficult for the protocol parties.

"The asset parties should jointly choose the same chain." Yang Mindao said. In other words, the ecology needs to make a choice to choose a network that can really continue to be called "Ethereum".

If only one chain is chosen, maintaining the status quo seems to be the optimal solution. "The fork will not take away the heat of Ethereum 1.0." Brother T said.

As a miner, investor, and founder of the DeFi project xDeFiLabs, Brother T can’t see the advantages of Ethereum 2.0. In his opinion, the current pain point can be solved by Layer2 or Polkadot. If they can’t solve it, then Ethereum 2.0 can't solve it either. "I can't find a reason why people would leave Ethereum 1.0," he said. "I even invested in an Ethereum ASIC mining machine project."

Unlike Bitcoin mining machines, the current Ethereum mining machines use GPUs for mining. The better the performance of the graphics card, the higher the mining efficiency. The concept of ASIC chips has never really appeared in the Ethereum ecosystem.

But at the same time that Ethereum 2.0 was launched, the Ethereum ASIC chip mining machine was also under intensive development. “Bitmain, Linzhi, and Innosilicon are all developing Ethereum ASIC mining machines.” People familiar with the matter told Rhythm BlockBeats, “The process is mainly 14nm or 16nm.”

Miners are profit-seeking, and mining machine manufacturers must also develop ASIC chips because they can ensure that miners are profitable. There is still a PoW period of two or three years before Ethereum turns to PoS. During this period, miners can use ASICs to mine. It is enough, but from another perspective, if the mining machine manufacturer has judged that the life of a mining machine is only two or three years, why bother to develop a new concept?

"If there is a fork, I will definitely support Ethereum 1.0." Brother T's views represent the vast majority of Ethereum miners. "At present, there are no miners who have asked us to provide PoS services." Uncle Miao said, "There seems to be no intersection between Ethereum PoW miners and PoS nodes."

So who is supporting Ethereum's PoS?

The new force of PoS

Like many people, Li Zelin, an Ethereum enthusiast, believes that Ethereum 2.0 is an iteration of the current version. To improve the performance of Ethereum itself, it is necessary to turn to a PoS-based system. “Even with the uncertainty, PoS is a necessary step.”

In his view, although there are already many Layer 2 solutions on the market, these solutions are more like system "plug-ins". "No matter how powerful the plug-in function is, it cannot represent the strength of the underlying infrastructure itself."

In November of this year, the launch of Ethereum 2.0 became the focus of community attention. Li Zelin, who had hundreds of ETHs in his hand, considered that since he had decided to hold Ethereum for a long time, he might as well participate in the ecology and do something. With the technical foundation, it should not be a problem to build a node and become a validator to participate in the pledge system.

The preparations went well, and he also set up an Ethereum PoS WeChat group to exchange ideas. At 20:00 on December 1st, the Ethereum 2.0 network genesis block was officially launched. After 5 minutes and 23 seconds, Li Zelin's node successfully dug out his first slot. Excited, he also posted a screenshot in Moments.

Many netizens posted on Twitter that they have become validators

Li Zelin was lucky. On the second day after the launch of Ethereum 2.0, more than 600 nodes in the entire network were punished for various problems. This is also a point that Ethereum 2.0 has been criticized for. Nodes must be online 24 hours a day, and they will be punished for going offline for any reason. This has also led to the rise of node service providers. Due to limited personal capabilities, 24-hour online and professional node service providers have become the most active group in the Ethereum 2.0 network.

But Li Zelin thinks this is not a reason not to recognize PoS. According to his experience, choosing a node in Hong Kong, China instead of a machine in the Mainland can reduce the probability of block synchronization delay, and setting up a backup machine is a way to avoid accidents.

"The miners are very likely to initiate a fork." As a PoS faction, Li Zelin also recognizes the possibility of a fork, but obviously, he is betting on the PoS chain. "Users will choose the new chain of Ethereum."

His tone was as firm as an Ethereum 1.0 supporter betting on a PoW chain.

Of course, the possible forks are still far away. The PoS consensus has to go through numerous tests, such as proposals, discussions, concept proofs, client implementations, attack scenario verification, and other procedures before it can be really used. There is even a possibility that everyone finds that PoS does not work in Ethereum. Ethereum 1.0+Layer2 has been recognized by the entire community. After several years, the consensus has returned to the same level. Everything about PoS is a trial and error.

"Ethereum is still the strongest public chain up to now. It's not because technology has first-mover advantages, but because consensus and market confidence have first-mover advantages. After so many years, people in all communities can embrace Ethereum in exploring new directions. There is a possibility of failure." Uncle Meow said.

The DAO incident, the Parity wallet incident, and the current DeFi hacking incident, Ethereum users have accepted the possibility of taking risks in Ethereum, and similarly, Ethereum 2.0 is also an adventure. This is a big adventure involving an ecology worth hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of users and developers, and the strongest public chain in the blockchain.