Week in Ethereum News December 28, 2019 annotated edition

When Christmas falls on a Wednesday, not many people choose to ship that week if they want publicity. So this was a pretty light issue.





Layer 1

Reminder: update your nodes for Muir Glacier upgrade

A proposal to make eth1 the first shard of eth2, post-phase1 and pre-phase2. Would require 1) stateless clients and 2) increase in gas prices for opcodes that call contracts

Trinity v0.1alpha34, ready for Muir Glacier

Vitalik’s proposal to make eth1 the first shard of eth2 is the news of the week. Of course, anything that turns off eth1’s proof of work (PoW) chain is a good thing, plus there is the advantage that it would obviate the need for a bridge between eth1 and eth2. However, I’d be fine with eth2 finalizing the eth1 chain so that we can reduce issuance and electricity waste by 90% and I think we can get there faster, depending on which tradeoffs we are willing to make. (For example, eth2 stakers could hold eth1 state and this would happen sooner, though this would violate Eth2’s design principles). It is a wide design space, and I am not qualified to evaluate which is the better call, since this seems entirely like an engineering estimation.

There is a post on r/ethereum right now that asks whether someone can confirm that there is no need to upgrade nodes because there is no hard fork. Siiiigh. MUIR GLACIER IS COMING. This further confirms my belief that we should have added the bomb delay into Istanbul. We also would have had less FUD from the anti-ETH crypto clickbait media who is always looking to create fake news for page views. In general, I think the risk of an unintentional chain split is highly overrated. Miners and exchanges are very motivated to stay up to date, many hobbyists would prefer to update once (and tend to do so closer to the fork date)

Meanwhile I went through all of 2019’s issue last night for the Year in Ethereum and it was interesting to see how the classfication evolved week by week. Since there was so little news this week, I combined eth1 and eth2 into layer1 like I was doing in the beginning of the year, but in general I am much happier with the classification lately. Also happy that client releases finally got moved up in prominence, since the client maintainers do relatively thankless work.





Stuff for developers

Random thoughts: There were some cool things built with Enigma at EthWaterloo. A lot of people were excited by the Solidity and Vyper syntax cheat sheet. Zeppelin keeps churning out tools improving the dev experience. 3Box continues to become a fundamental primitive for devs.

Ecosystem

Ben has written a piece relatively similar to this one previously, but I still enjoyed it. A worthwhile read.

Meanwhile, I think it is great that Tornado.cash has added more levels, but I do worry a bit about the anonymity set being stretched thin. Bruno Škvorc had an interesting tweet about leaving a bunch of ETH in the mixer just in case. He calls them notes because you use a note to withdraw your ETH from the mixer into an untraceable address.

Application layer

I had seen things about Zippie previously but didn’t get it. However, getting a bunch of users is the best way to get attention! I did a quick trial of the product and it was neat. Using airtime retail in Kenya to onboard people into web3 wallets is promising.

I had somehow missed Pepo until now and have played with it daily since. The hard part for me is feeling like I have something I want to record a video on, unless it is a super spicy take on orange memecoins. I have a few of those, they tend to leak out on Twitter despite my attempts to contain them.

Tokens / Business / Regulation

For all the drama after Micah’s article a few weeks ago, no one subsequently noticed that the vote failed. MKR holders decided they did not yet think it was time to add a time delay to governance decisions.

Meanwhile, Gabe Shapiro put a lot of words onto paper about regulation and tokenized networks. I don’t agree with all of it, but for being so long and written by a lawyer, it is a very quick read.



General

So trusted setups might not be as future-proof as we hoped, though since Week in Ethereum News was published some of the ZCash cryptographers have pushed back on some of the claims in the thread.

Vitalik’s post was the essay equivalent of subtweeting. He never mentioned Bitcoin, but his point is that the maximalists who say “Bitcoin is a perfect layer1 as-is, because you can do everything on layer2” are wrong. You can’t do rollup right now on Bitcoin, and we all know Bitcoin will not make the changes necessary to do so.

Respect to Eric Wall for saying something that is so obvious to many of us, but in his tribe it has become dogma to be anti-proof of stake.

And going in reverse order, Google’s anti-crypto week was likely a coincidence, but who knows? It is super frustrating that they have done this again to MetaMask, coincidentally right after banning so many crypto Youtubers.

To build on that point: some people say that in the long-run Ethereum will just be a neutral platform for devs and not change the world much. I would say that is already a huge change.