Annotated edition for latest Week in Ethereum News

So last week I mentioned the annotated editions and then…didn’t do one. Just got too busy. So we’ll see how this one goes.

One thing to note: Edcon and EthParis both got cancelled.

Original Week in Ethereum News issue.





Eth1



Literally nobody: A few people on core devs call: ProgPoW!

I don’t really get it. The reason ProgPoW keeps being so controversial is that core devs don’t publicize it much, and then they suddenly announce that it’s going in a hard fork. Add to that the fact that every time miners advocate for ProgPoW, they show themselves to be outside of the Ethereum community, and you can understand why it produces such strong reactions.

Add to this the fact that one ProgPoW proponent (though oddly he sometimes says he isn’t) has told me explicitly that he doesn’t think the community can evaluate ProgPoW so he doesn’t even try to convince the larger ecosystem.

I go back to what I wrote a few weeks ago:

at some point there is going to be (another) fight over ProgPoW. It’s an odd beast where both sides are convinced that they have already won - meaning that anger and disgruntled ragequits are almost guaranteed.



It only gets worse when you just announce forks and don’t try to set a process and make sure people are heard.

I have more thoughts on governance, but that’s it for now.

Meanwhile, lots of very interesting work going on for stateless Eth1, which is currently necessary to turn off proof of work (though I don’t think it should be)









Eth2

Lots of phase2 stuff this week. An overview is that we’re still not particularly close to phase2 as there are plenty of research and design decisions to be made even before all the nitty gritty of engineering tradeoffs.

The flipside that I don’t think many people understand is that once we get data availability on phase1, then we have all the scalability we need for years and years. 64 shards which can each process 3000 rollup transactions per second, means we get to 200,000 transactions per second. and 3000 is probably low, as we can further reduce the gas cost of opcodes used by rollup, and add a few more shards too if we need to. [Caveat: we still don’t have a rollup chain live, but….soon™. Check out Daniel Goldman’s state of optimistic rollup below]

Furthermore, when we have phase1, we can turn off PoW which will cut issuance way down and stop wasting so much electricity.

tldr: phase2 is hard and not near, but phase0 is imminent and phase1 has a spec for review.

Required reading: Casey Detrio’s phase1 and done, which was the first writing of this.





Layer2

Rollups are all the rage right now, as indicated above, but state channels are still happening. They’re hard as we’ve found out over the years from attempts on Bitcoin and Ethereum - doing channels is easy but channel networks are hard.





Stuff for developers

This week’s issue was pretty late. One thing I often do is roughly group things by subtopic under a header. This week that didn’t happen, things just got thrown into “stuff for devs” with no rhyme or reason to placement.

I’m very interested to see if people check out the eth2 list for ETHLondon.

That Sam Sun is a machine!





Ecosystem

The DAObacle of EthDenver judging means the submissions got put together today, so they will be in next week’s issue, along with here. I don’t think anyone was shocked that the DAO judging didn’t work, but if you never have a few failures, you aren’t taking enough risks. Cheers to John Paller and all the EthDenver stewards for making the American Devcon a great event year after year.

Check out EF’s wishlist and see if EF wants to fund something you want to work on.

Enterprise

Enterprise on mainnet means that the line between enterprise and app layer is blurring. I should probably move this section.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

Submit your startup to TheLAO for funding

MolochDAOs on Aragon (Dandelion orgs) are live on mainnet

ProgPoW returned as a debate topic this week, as core devs scheduled a separate hard fork for just ProgPoW. Meanwhile my Twitter feed is decidedly against ProgPoW, eg here

ERC2520: Multiple contenthash records for ENS

ERC2525: ENS login

It’s fairly well known that I was a skeptic of TheDAO in q2 2016, but I’m very interested to see how these reincarnations of TheDAO go.

bZx hacks

This section took a surprisingly long time to put together, but it’s definitely what people in the community were talking about all week.

I’d say it’s bullish for NexusMutual to pay out, especially because the mutual members first denied the claim but then paid out the claim when the facts of the matter became clear. It’s also bullish for Opyn - NexusMutual and Opyn aren’t competitors exactly, they have different tradeoffs for people looking to hedge or protect themselves from risks.





Application layer

Meanwhile the flashloans made Maker’s holders decide to add the time delay to prevent any flashloan governance attack.

Compound hit a big number and now they’re decentralizing their governance, which means that the value accrual will probably be voted on by its token holders. Fascinating stuff.

Cheers to Decentraland and Enjin for going live, and Synthetix adding ETH as collateral should be big for them.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

Enigma wasn’t necessarily who I thought the SEC would go after next.

Simon’s personal gratitude tokens are very interesting to me. It’s like challenge coins but with intrinsic value.





General

The general section is becoming the cryptography section.

One odd thing about Mastering Ethereum is that Ethereum is still under construction. Writing that book ensures lots of future work for it to be kept up to date. Or a second volume. But in the meantime, let’s get it translated!