Original:, Compilation: Rhythm Research Institute
As the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 is slowly approaching, those who thought that ETH2 will never come have begun to pay attention to the development of Ethereum again. On October 19, 2020, Bankless invited Vitalik to have an in-depth discussion on the design concept and original intention of Ethereum.
At the beginning of the interview, Vitalik simply reiterated the ETH2 roadmap and stated that he would build a basic PoS public chain that anyone can use in the 0th stage, as mentioned in the promotion, and provide sharding and Rollups in the first stage. The application expansion can finally reach 100,000TPS.
Why is PoS+ sharding
The application of PoS, a complex system, is mainly to achieve several key goals. One is to eliminate the inefficiency and energy waste of the PoW system, and the PoW system needs to avoid centralization risks as ASICs become more and more mature. Compared with the PoW system, the PoS system is more democratic and open, and people can more easily participate in the network, whether it is an ordinary user or a pledger.
Sharding is a scaling solution whose main purpose is to increase the total transaction volume that Ethereum can handle. Scalability is very critical for Ethereum, because Ethereum should be a global public infrastructure that anyone can interact with. As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet in the new era, it should be open and anyone can easily participate in it. If sharding is not adopted as a decentralized expansion solution, the alternative may be to let a centralized organization run a super network and then access a trusted side chain, but this is not what Vitalik wants to build. There have been many historical events that have proved that the transitional centralized system is very easy to be manipulated, and will eventually deviate from the original intention of the designer.
Keep the original intention of Ethereum
Decentralized permissionless network
The Ethereum network does not want to be the kind of network that relies on super nodes. This is where the Ethereum network distinguishes it from other networks. Without relying on any supercomputers, Ethereum should be a fully functional system. The ideal situation is that a group of home laptops are running the Ethereum network. As some Bitcoin believers have said, if the network is over-centralized and controlled by several institutions, it may end up in unsatisfactory directions.
EHT2 wants to create a PoS ecosystem in which anyone can participate. This is why Ethereum has not tended to the super node approach, nor does it believe in the assumption of “majority honesty”, which is very similar to the idea of Bitcoin . In the network, it is best for participants to verify the chain themselves and try not to trust the miners, because the miners are not necessarily honest.
In general:
1. ETH2 is more environmentally friendly and more efficient;
2. ETH2 ensures that most ordinary users can directly participate in the writing of the chain;
3. At the same time, ensure that most ordinary users can directly read the data of the chain without relying on trusted APIs;
4. Allow most ordinary users to participate in the consensus of the chain.
If you combine 2, 3, and 4, you will get a blockchain that is resistant to auditing and social and political attacks.
Do people really care about the characteristics of Ethereum?
There are many competing Ethereum products that compromise decentralization, permissionlessness, and the conservative nature of Ethereum. However, in essence, the centralized path can be very efficient in the short term, but it will have serious side effects in the long run. For example, a typical example is Steemit, which was acquired by Justin Sun. Over-centralization will eventually lead to a fork in the community. EOS has also experienced bribery attacks. In the end, the core participants in the centralized chain will collude and erode the rights of ordinary users.
From the perspective of governance, if the voting governance power of a chain is controlled by those large currency holders, it is very dangerous in the long run.
Therefore, in the long run, users are very concerned about the characteristics of decentralization and permissionlessness. These qualities take time for people to slowly realize their importance. When the general environment is good, there are no disputes in the community, and everyone’s opinions tend to be unified. In this case, everyone is very happy and there will be no problems with governance. But when there is a problem, there will be disputes in the community, and opinions will no longer be unified, and the rights and interests of users of over-centralized chains may be damaged.
Other communities that stick to these characteristics
Coda is very good. They are trying to build a chain that can use zero-knowledge proofs, so that zk snark can directly verify the chain instead of individuals, and nodes cannot directly do evil. Mimblewimble and ETC are also good. Although ETC does not implement sharding, it tries to maintain a decentralized expansion plan.
However, for projects that insist on these characteristics as a selling point, they are not as popular as projects that focus on other concepts. Because adherence to these characteristics is destined to mean that the stories that can be told are very limited, but if you use other concepts to tell the story, you can tell a lot of things. Although there will be few chains focusing on these characteristics, Vitalik believes that this part of the project will eventually be successful.
Long-standing PoS and sharding
Before the release of ETH1.0, PoS and sharding had been identified as the direction to improve ETH. Vitalik answered the question of how the community chose the technical direction in the early stage.
As early as 2015, the community basically reached a consensus on the technical path of PoS and sharding. The occurrence of the DAO bifurcation reinforces this point. Those who opposed PoS and sharding also opposed the DAO fork, so they finally chose to support ETC.
It took a while to be sure that PoS and sharding were the right technical direction. Looking back at the original article about Slasher, you will find that at the beginning of this article it is written: Slasher is preparing for the possibility of implementing PoS in the future. In January 2014, Vitalik was actually not sure whether POS is essential. On the defect.
If you look back at sharding, Vitalik believes that the application of sharding technology on the blockchain is also an unresolved problem. In this article, sharding, along with several other problems, is listed as a problem that the blockchain cannot solve at the time, or can be solved but needs to make essential trade-offs.
After 2014, another question became the focus of heated discussion, that is, the “Nothing at Stake” problem of the PoS system, which Vitalik answered in this article. Although PoS cannot have exactly the same characteristics as PoW, PoS can absorb the advantages of the PoW system as much as possible.
Between 16 and 17 years, people conducted in-depth research on other consensus algorithms, and finally figured out how to apply the PoW security model to PoS.
For sharding, the main problem is how to choose the best security model. In 2015, Vitalik and the technical community began to try random sampling (Random Sampling), which was a breakthrough in applying sharding technology to the chain. In 2017, the community completed a breakthrough in the proof of data availability, which enabled the shard chain to remain safe even in the case of “most dishonest”. After these explorations, we found that fragmentation is a feasible solution.
When ETH1.0 was released in 2015, we thought that PoS should be realized in one to one and a half years, but it showed in real time that the ideas at the time were too optimistic, but everyone was very confident at the time.
Looking at the token distribution mechanism from the monetary policy of Ethereum
The consensus of the community on the currency policy of Ethereum is not the same as it is now. If you look at the original Ethereum white paper, you will find that the original issuance plan is to issue 16 million ETHs each year, with permanent additional issuance. The basic principle of this policy is that the system needs to be issued continuously to keep the system safe. At that time, the community believed that the security cost of PoS is not necessarily lower than that of PoW, so it is possible to maintain the PoW mechanism forever. And the community hopes that not only those who participate in the network now can get ETH, but those who participate in the network later should also be able to get ETH. This was the design logic at the time.
Later, Vitalik and the technical team believed that although PoS is necessary and feasible, PoW may be the most equal and fair distribution method. From 10 to 13 years, PoW was considered the most democratic token distribution model, and even became a big selling point of BTC at that time: as long as you turn on your computer, you can get some BTC. This may also be the most attractive point of BTC at the time. But in fact, PoW cannot form a long-term stable equilibrium in technology. When mining is very profitable, special mining machines will appear. BTC is the best example, from the GPU revolution to the FPGA revolution to the ASIC revolution. For Ethereum, although its PoW algorithm has special resistance to ASICs to ensure the fairness of ETH mining, as time goes on, GPU-based systems will become more and more money-oriented And resources, it may eventually cause ETH HASH to suffer ASIC risks.
So PoW will move towards ASIC anyway. Although ETH uses GPU mining, professional ETH miners will still drive amateur miners out of the market.
This is a problem with the PoW mining mechanism. BTC already has the problem of chaebol rule, and it is only a matter of time for ETH. No matter how the algorithm is improved, it is impossible to avoid going to ASIC.
The design challenge of the token distribution mechanism is to ensure its neutrality. The advantage of the PoW system is that people know what the algorithm looks like, anyone can do verification, and anyone can participate. But the way of distributing through social media like Ripple is very unfair. First, not everyone can participate in it. Second, hackers can register 10,000 accounts in order to get tokens. You don’t want to see an underlying public chain. The token distribution model is like this. For the PoS system, its essence is to redistribute tokens to token holders and allow token holders to maintain network security. Except for the existing PoS and PoW token distribution mechanisms, there is no more neutral token distribution mechanism. If the PoW and PoS allocation mechanism is slightly changed, there may be other disputes.
PoW VS PoS
Many people think that the disadvantage of PoS is that as long as you participate in the network and get tokens when the world is created, you can always participate in the network as a pledger. However, the miners in PoW need to constantly update the hardware facilities.
Vitalik believes that POS is not 100% better than POW. From this point, PoW is better than PoS in reducing long-term capture.
First of all, the PoW market is still very young now, and may often be affected by the outside world, but these problems may no longer be a problem for the mature PoW market. But regarding the thermodynamic limit problem that is often discussed by BTC miners, when the cost of producing a hashed answer is as low as the limit, the efficiency cannot be improved. This will indeed become a problem that PoW cannot solve. Secondly, for POS, if you have 32 ETH, you can become a validator yourself and get more tokens. If you don’t have that much ETH, you can also get ETH by staking with other people. In the PoW system, you must have enough start-up capital to purchase a mining machine, otherwise you will not be able to mine. In this way, PoS also eliminates the problem of excessive wealth concentration. Finally, the return of POS is lower than that of POW as a whole, and the more people who participate, the lower the return.
So overall, PoW has its advantages, while PoS is easier to participate but the benefits will be lower.
The most important point is what if someone owns 51% of coins or 51% of computing power. Compared to PoW, PoS gives the community more salvation solutions. For POW, you can only watch 51% attacks happen. Maybe you can soft fork, but the attacker can continue to attack the fork chain. Vitalik calls this kind of attack “SPAWN CAMP ATTAC”. Only the POW algorithm can be changed, but this not only harms the attacker, but also harms ordinary miners. When the PoW algorithm is changed, no one will have an ASIC mining machine with the new algorithm for a period of time. If an attacker monopolizes the CPU GPU market, the attacker can continue to attack, and the chain will be over. So for the PoW chain, he has no way to attack with 51%. But the POS system is different. Those who are attacked can restart another fork chain and delete the attacker’s coins from the fork chain. You don’t need to perform a hard fork. So the attacker will lose a lot of coins every time they attack.
Why participate in the pledge of ETH2
Vitalik believes that this is an announcement to be a citizen of Ethereum, and it can also receive income as an incentive.
If you are unable to verify the block producer, you should also try to participate in the network to verify the Ethereum network. The reason is mentioned in this article. It is not necessary to verify everything on the chain. You can selectively verify, such as verifying data availability, or verifying fraud proofs, or even running a light node. This can also prevent you from going Trust a node. This autonomous behavior is not only good for users themselves, but ultimately also good for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Why does Ethereum choose sharding
(Rhythmic Note: The concept of sharding is derived from the concept of database partition tables. The so-called sharding is actually to put data on different databases and hosts, so that data can be processed in parallel and improve processing efficiency. In the blockchain , Each slice processes the transactions in its own slice, so as to achieve the effect of capacity expansion.)
As early as 2014, Vitalik and the Ethereum community began to explore and research sharding. Relevant researchers agreed at the beginning that every transfer on the chain needs to be verified by each node is a very stupid thing, and Ethereum should use a more efficient way to ensure on-chain security.
The study and research on computer science in the past few years has given Vitalik a lot of inspiration. During the learning process, Vitalik deeply realized that when you add a little more complexity to an efficient algorithm, you can achieve the best efficiency.
A good example is the problem of sequence sorting: how to arrange a random number sequence from small to large. Ordinary people may choose to select the smallest sequence from the sequence and arrange it. This algorithm is usually called O( N^2), that is to say, the step of processing the sequence is the square of the sequence length.
However, this sorting algorithm is not the most efficient. Smarter algorithms may be similar to merge sort, fast sorting, and some other sorting algorithms. The required steps of these algorithms are no longer O(N^2), but It is O(LogN).
For example, if you have a sequence of 100 numbers, since 100 is a three-digit number, the processing steps required are 100*3, which is 300 steps. When you understand the logic of these algorithms, you will feel that these algorithms are very concise and clear from a mathematical point of view. Although these algorithms are a bit more complicated than ordinary algorithms, their efficiency is much improved.
The original blockchain is like an ordinary algorithm, each node verifies every transfer, although simple and easy to understand, it is very inefficient. What the blockchain needs now is a slightly more complex but more efficient algorithm. Sharding may be such an algorithm. In the sharding world, the validator does not need to verify everything, only a few, which is very efficient.
But in this case, how to resist 1% attacks (the attacker concentrates the computing power to attack a certain part of a chain and makes the attacked part unable to operate normally)? After research and exploration, researchers have now come up with several very clever ways to resist this attack.
People’s doubts about sharding
Many people still think that sharding is not feasible. The criticisms are mainly divided into two levels:
First of all, they simply don’t understand the concepts of “indirect verification” and “probabilistic verification”. They believe that verification can only be black and white, otherwise you have verified the transfer, otherwise you have not verified. There are no intermediate events.
Secondly, they deeply question the various assumptions in the sharding. They believe that these assumptions may make the system more fragile when the real system is running.
Let’s use “proof of fraud” as an example. The proof of fraud is essentially a large-scale “probabilistic verification”. A small group of people verifies the calculation results and signs the verification certificate and then pledges some ETH on the certificate. Anyone can verify and challenge the proof. When someone verifies the proof and finds it is wrong, they can challenge it. After the challenge is successful , You can get ETH pledged on the proof as a reward.
So what is the problem with “proof of fraud”? In essence, his problem is his “Synchrony Assumption”. Generally speaking, when the network is operating normally, the fraud proof can be verified in time and synchronized to the network in time, but when the network has problems or delays, once the “synchronization assumption” is broken, the “fraud proof” It is no longer valid.
If the algorithm or mechanism can avoid these assumptions, and the system can work normally without any assumptions, this is the best. For sharding, researchers have been trying to reduce the number of hypotheses as much as possible. For example, before sharding relied on “majority honesty assumptions”, now even if you control 2/3 of the validators, you cannot put invalid blocks on the chain. For “fraud proof”, if zk Rollup is used, we can guarantee the security of the shards without applying fraud proof.
Ethereum roadmap with Rollup as the core
In October this year, Vitalik released a discussion post titled “The Roadmap of Ethereum with Rollup as the Core” on the forum. Many people believe that Ethereum is going to abandon sharding and turn to the Rollup solution for expansion. Vitalik explicitly denied this statement. And further explained in detail.
(Rhythmic note: Rollup is a two-layer expansion solution on Ethereum. Simply put, in order to reduce the operating burden of the first-level main chain, Rollup will process a large number of transactions, and the final result will be notified to the main chain after the processing is completed.)
1. The similarities and differences between Rollup and Sharding
Regarding the difference between sharding and Rollup, Vitalik said that many people now have misunderstandings about sharding, thinking that sharding is a group of nodes, but this is not sharding as Vitalik understands.
Vitalik believes that each of the shards is a logical subset of a blockchain, and then a group of nodes are sent to verify this logical subset, and each node can verify multiple shards.
Rollup has some of the characteristics of fragmentation, but not all.
One of the similarities is the splitting of calculations on the chain. If you have many Rollups, different Rollups will be responsible for their calculations. This is how Rollup expands.
Another similarity is that it is impossible to directly synchronize interaction/execution across slices or rollups. Each slice or Rollup is a separate “domain”, and the interaction within the domain can be synchronized. , But cross-domain interaction cannot be synchronized. Although it is possible to achieve cross-Rollup synchronization interaction, it is very difficult.
One difference between sharding and Rollup is the security model. The security of different Rollups on a chain is responsible for the same data layer. For example, Rollup on Ethereum, their data will all be verified by ETH nodes, and sharding is not like this, so to some extent Rollup avoids Security flaws in some shards.
Although sharding and Rollup have many similarities and differences, for users, the user experience will not be much different. Another interesting thing is that when ETH2 applies Rollup, you will find that different Rollups will use different shards. Maybe one Rollup uses 5 shards, or 5 Rollups share one shard.
2. What does it mean for the Ethereum community to take Rollup as the core
Vitalik first shared his views on the difference between the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Compared to the Bitcoin community, the Ethereum community is more pragmatic. For example, for the issue of Ethereum Gas Limit, after the coordination of various interest groups in the community, the best block size will be finally weighed, instead of sticking to a unified standard, which will eventually lead to a fork.
Ethereum now faces two very real problems. From the soaring gas cost, it can be seen that Ethereum is in extreme demand for expansion and hopes that the expansion will be realized immediately. Excessive gas fees have forced many applications on Ethereum to be forced out, especially those non-financial applications.
From a practical technical perspective, Rollup is the best technology option available. Although the state channel is also available now, the state channel is only suitable for individual applications, which is too restrictive. Plasma is also an option, but Plasma is only suitable for payment and does not support general contracts. So even in the mid-term perspective, Rollup will be the best option for expansion.
Another interesting thing is that if you look at the roadmap of Rollup and ETH2 together, we can see that the PoS of Phase0 (zeroth phase), the data sharding of Phase1, the execution sharding of Phase2, As long as Rollup is added to Phase1, Ethereum will be able to achieve extremely high throughput, so as long as people are willing to continue to adhere to Rollup technology, not only the current Ethereum can achieve expansion, but in the future, the throughput of Phase1 of ETH2 will far exceed people’s imagination. .
So people need to recognize the reality, and the Ethereum community should be committed to the development of Rollup. Vitalik gave several reasons:
1. Rollup can be realized very quickly, and has strong capacity expansion.
2. If the function of the underlying public chain can be single, then ETH2 can abandon some security assumptions such as “fraud proof”, then security will be greatly improved, which will also enable Rollup to focus more on its own work.
3. As mentioned in the “Ethereum Satellite Ecology”, if Ethereum can focus on Rollup, ETH2 will be able to cooperate with other Ethereum helpers, enablers, and even competitors in the ecosystem, and Ethereum will become a platform for these projects. These projects are like satellites surrounding Ethereum and interacting with Ethereum through bridges, ultimately creating synergies at the executive level.
3. The impact of the second layer of L2 on the first layer of Ethereum
Vitalik believes that in the future, most users will live in the second-tier network for a long time, and may not interact with the first-tier network once in a few years. However, there may be several situations where the user will still interact with the first-level network:
1. When users can shuttle between the first-tier and second-tier networks with a very low handling fee through an efficient “large-scale exit” mechanism;
2. If the second layer network crashes;
3. For some applications, the core of the application is more suitable to be registered on the primary chain. For example, the application will issue coins on the first-tier network, and then deposit the tokens in the second-tier network, and then people will use the tokens in the second-tier network.
Vitalik is very confident that over time in the future, users will slowly migrate from the first-tier network to the second-tier network.
The part of “Ethereum Roadmap with Rollup as the Core” is to be continued. In “The Design Art of Ethereum (Part 2)”, Vitalik will continue to discuss the details of Rollup expansion and discuss the EIP-1559 and Ethereum 2.0 Phase 1.5 gives an overview and explanation.
Ethereum roadmap with Rollup as the core
4. Centralization and decentralization expansion
Ultimately, users will choose to use a decentralized or centralized Layer 2 network. Coinbase is a typical centralized Layer 2 network, and there are permissioned consortium chains like Liquid. If you look at the Ethereum ecosystem, many applications are migrating to testnets like xDai or Ropsten.
Vitalik believes that people are forgiven for using these centralized solutions before the Ethereum ecosystem has a very suitable decentralized expansion solution. But in the end, when the decentralized solution is implemented, it is better for users to choose the decentralized solution.
5. Composability of the expansion plan
For some specific applications, special processing schemes will appear, allowing applications to achieve composability in asynchronous situations. What Vitalik mentioned before is a good example. This combined problem is classified as a “train and hotel” problem:
If you have a train ticket reservation contract on Shard A and the hotel reservation contract is on Shard B, how can you ensure that you can successfully complete the two reservations simultaneously? When the train ticket reservation contract and the hotel reservation contract are in the same shard, the synchronization is a very simple matter. You only need to send one transaction, and the transaction includes instructions to complete two reservations. If the transaction is successful , The two instructions will be completed at the same time, or the transaction fails, the two instructions will fail together.
However, in an asynchronous environment, this task is more difficult to complete. If you want to complete it, you need to apply the Yanking mechanism. The working principle of the Yanking mechanism is: In the first step, you call the train ticket reservation contract in Shard A, and then create a separate and independent contract with reservation rights. In the second step, you call and create the hotel reservation rights contract in Shard B in the same way. In the third step, you transfer the independently created train ticket and hotel reservation rights contract to your shard. The fourth step, now that all the contracts you need are in the same shard, you can complete the synchronization operation.
The reason for the success of this mechanism is that you created the required permission transfers of asynchronous contracts in different shards in the same shard in advance, and then in the last step, the two permission contracts you assigned were in the same shard. In the same shard, the synchronization operation can be completed. Solving this problem of “trains and hotels” is critical for decentralized exchanges and various DeFi projects.
In addition to Yanking, another solution is to classify different types of applications into different shards or Rollups. For example, if a high-value DeFi application is placed in a Rollup, this Rollup may have a higher Gas Price, and other applications are clustered in other Rollups, but they do not have the ability to synchronize links with high-value applications.
Another interesting thing is that after the sharding is complete, a Rollup can interact with multiple shards, which means that a Rollup can use data from multiple shards. For example, a high-performance Rollup focused on DeFi can scale multiple shards.
6.Phase 2 of ETH2
In extreme cases, ETH2 does not need to enter Phase2, Rollups can meet the expansion needs, and ultimately only need to merge ETH1 and ETH2. Essentially you don’t need to make major changes, but you can make some additional upgrades, similar to upgrading to Casper CBC, or applying more zero-knowledge proofs.
A non-extreme situation is that if future shards become safer and more convenient to use, and the underlying network is not very crowded and expensive, then more shards may become executable smart contracts and other application functions Executable fragmentation. Another situation is that we can postpone Phase2, and when zk Snark can perform zero-knowledge proof EVM, the underlying public chain no longer needs to rely on “fraud proof” to ensure security during execution.
There will be many different versions of Phase2 that implement ETH2, and Vitalik believes that there is no need to pay too much attention to one of them. At the same time, Vitalik said that with the help of Rollup, ETH2’s Phase2 is not the key to achieving expansion, and Rollup may be an easier and faster way to come.
How to treat EIP-1559
Vitalk believes that the original intention of EIP-1559 is to improve the Ethereum transaction rate market. In the current rate market, if the network is crowded, users not only need to pay high transaction fees, but also have to go through a long wait. EIP-1559 attempts to mitigate and offset the volatility of transaction fees in the form of flexible block capacity. (For more details about EIP-1559, please see)
In a paper by Vitalik, it is mentioned at the same time that EIP-1559 can avoid the inefficiency of the first-price auction model and also get rid of the security problems caused by the “Fee Dominant Blockchain” (Fee Dominant Blockchain). In general, EIP-1559 solves many problems in the current rate market.
EIP-1559 destruction mechanism
Another point that attracted everyone’s attention was the destruction mechanism promoted by EIP-1559. In essence, the destruction feature of EIP-1559 establishes the central position of ETH in the Ethereum ecosystem. If there is no destruction mechanism, then ETH will become an “unprivileged” ordinary asset, which means that eventually other assets in the Ethereum network can replace ETH.
Especially in Rollup, if the “Sequencer” (Sequencer) uses ETH to pay the fee, but the user uses DAI or other assets to pay the fee, the final sequencer can reach an agreement with the mining pool privately, use other methods to pay, and no longer use it ETH, then the problem that this brings is that in order to protect the security of the network, more and more ETH will be printed out, which will eventually burden ETH’s own value.
EIP-1559’s transaction fee destruction mechanism essentially eliminates this problem. Paying ETH is the only way to allow data to be recorded on the Ethereum chain, because if the user does not pay ETH, one party must pay ETH, because in the end there must be One party needs to destroy the ETH required for the transaction fee.
EIP-1559 and MEV (miners can extract value)
The squeezable value of miners refers to the unequal benefits that miners get through their privileged advantage of adjusting the order of transactions in the block.
For solving MEV, a big challenge is that there are many types of MEV. Transaction fee is a key MEV. By implementing EIP-1559, the value of transaction fee can be mostly captured by the agreement. Another MEV is to extract arbitrage value. Miners are not very good at extracting this value. In the future of Rollup world, most of this arbitrage value will be obtained by Rollup sequencers and Rollup project parties. This phenomenon actually reflects a very interesting equilibrium. Value is no longer fully captured by security, but given To other public goods (Public Goods).
Phase1.5 of ETH2
Vitalik said that the Phase1.5 of ETH2 is the merger of ETH1 and ETH2. When merging, the current global status of ETH1, account balance, smart contract code, smart contract storage and other data will be cut and pasted into the ETH2 system. If you have an ETH1 client, the client will stop tracking the ETH1 chain. Start tracing the ETH2 chain, and you will no longer interact with the ETH1 chain, but the ETH2 chain.
Users will be insensitive to the migration from ETH1 to ETH2, and users do not need to do anything. If you are a client developer, the migration of ETH1 to ETH2 is essentially like a special hard fork. After the migration, the ETH1 chain will no longer be used.
In addition to the implementation of the ETH2 version of EIP-1559, ETH2 will also implement “Stateless execution”: block execution without a global state. This is what ETH1 is slowly exploring, and researchers have also released many EIPs on stateless execution.
Quick question and answer link
Question 1: Will Phase0 be released in 2020 or 2021?
Vitalik: 2020
Question 2: Do you prefer zk Rollup or Optimistic Rollup?
Vitalik: Optimistic in the short term, zk in the long term, because zk can be used in a more general environment.
Question 3: What does Moloch mean to you?
Vitalik: Moloch is the god of punishment for non-cooperation. He represents: The mistakes in the world will not become mistakes if people can cooperate better.
Question 4: Who is leading the central bank digital currency track in China or the United States?
Vitalik: China’s DCEP is indeed the front runner on this track. In the long run, competition between governments will not be an interesting topic. The more interesting question may be, can DCEP beat WeChat Pay and Alipay? What are the advantages of central bank digital currency compared to other digital payment systems? Will people eventually use central bank digital currencies for cross-border trade? Or will people eventually choose decentralized cryptocurrency? I don’t know what will happen in the end.
Question 5: At the time of interview recording, 142,000 Bitcoins have been minted in the Ethereum network. What do you think will be the relationship between Bitcoin and Ethereum in the long run?
Vitalik: I very much hope that more and more bitcoins will be minted in the Ethereum network in the future, but what I am very worried about is the trust model of miners. Many bitcoins minted on Ethereum try to cover up and not disclose their trust model, and these miners are relatively centralized. I very much hope to see decentralized foundries, at least using a multi-signature trust model. The trust model of tBTC is more interesting.
Question 6: If, as you said, Phase0 of ETH2 is successfully released in 2020, do you think people should pledge on ETH2 as soon as possible, or should they pledge again after a period of time?
Vitalik: If you are a brave and fearless enthusiast, you should do the pledge as soon as possible, otherwise you should wait for a while. In fact, we want a smaller number of people to participate in the pledge the first time, and then slowly participate when everyone feels it is appropriate.
