Week in Ethereum News, Dec 22, 2019 annotated edition

Regular Week in Ethereum News for December 22, 2019. This is the annotated version.

I’ll probably do a few more of these, as I think any experiment needs to get to a certain number of trials before evaluation. But the response last week was less than overwhelming. Of course it doesn’t help that the second annotated issue will be on Christmas Eve for most of the world, which will probably put the third issue on NYE.

This was a packed edition, and I have a feeling the annotated version will be long too!





Eth1





The stürm und drang of this week was the Muir Glacier hard fork. Let’s discuss:

Eric Conner first noticed that the bomb was going off awhile ago. It’s true; no one noticed until he did. This is mildly embarrassing for Ethereum, but not a big deal. In a decentralized ecosystem, everyone else assumed someone else was watching. And the risk is very little, because the worst case scenario is exactly what happened: the bomb went off, block times slowed down the tiniest bit, we do a hard fork to fix it.

After Eric noticed, It was decided that this should go into a separate fork instead of the upcoming Istanbul fork, because Istanbul-ready clients were already out and core devs want to make sure everyone has lots of time to update nodes. [This is a mistake in my view, because nodes always get updated - something we saw when we had just a few days to get everyone to update their nodes in Constantinople and it went off just fine. And by the way, the perpetual “oh no, not enough nodes have updated X days out from the fork” is good for headlines and clicks, but almost always a very overblown story.]

So they set a date which was supposed to be Jan 6. It’s not easy to predict how the bomb (”difficulty adjustment”) will interact with the amount of hash power, especially when price volatility affects the desire to mine. There’s also conventions about what block numbers get used, and the desire to not let block times get too long. They thought they were scheduling Muir Glacier for the 6th. They appear to be wrong, as the chosen block number at one point recently was estimated for Dec 31, and then Jan 1. Lots of people whined, some a bit ridiculously so. Some people just like to whine! Note that the people who made the decision are the people most affected by it: the core developers. Estimation is hard.

The dumber thing that Bitcoin maximalists like to repeat is that “monetary policy changed.” That’s misleading at best, though it is true in the very strictest and most literal sense of the word.

The “bomb” or “ice age” or “difficulty adjustment” is not about monetary policy. The bomb’s purpose is to remove the default towards inertia and prevent capture by a relatively small amount of core devs. It forces all of us to come to consensus on what is best for the network. It only tangentially touches “monetary policy,” which is that network issuance of ETH is very slightly reduced as block times go up.

Ethereum’s “monetary policy” is that ETH should be issued to secure the network within reasonable confidence levels, and no more. This is in stark contrast to Bitcoin, who chose an issuance policy and is now hoping, praying, and memeing that 21 million BTC is sustainable. (It isn’t).

The bottom line here is that it’s true that much of the layer 1 talent is working on Eth2. Scalable blockchains that enable web3 has always been the Ethereum vision, so it makes sense. We should all be grateful to the folks who are doing yeoman’s work on Eth1. Peter, Nethermind, Alexey, etc The list could be long.

To sum up this eth1 section: eth1 clients continue to be improving, sync times are going down, and the private networking option of using TOR is very needed. Also: unlike what maxis say, you can run a full Eth node on a Raspberry Pi.





Eth2





The constant question I get is: when does Eth2 ship? The goal is still the end of q1, though it may slip into April. The beacon chain is moving along toward production. There’s a spec audit due in a couple months. There’s still some work to be done on optimizing clients and nailing down networking, but it’s happening. The research stuff in this week (data availability, Vitalik’s post on a meta execution environment) is aimed at phase 1 and 2.

It’s true that some of that phase 1 and 2 is in some flux. Of course it is! Should we prioritize a two way bridge, finalizing the eth1 chain, seamlessly porting eth1 to eth2, scalability (now!) from rollups, etc? (to be clear, as I understand it most of those things aren’t a question of tradeoffs, more a question of prioritization of dev resources). Personally I think finalizing the eth1 chain should be a priority. Drop eth1 issuance by 90% and stop wasting so much electricity.

Finally, the “staking” will lead to centralization argument drives me a little nuts. Compared to centralized PoW mining? Impossible that it could be less centralized than PoW mining, which is very easily identifiable by any state level actor just by looking at power usage. Plus run by a few mining pools, plus generally geographically centralized, etc etc.





Layer2

Rollups are here! Loopring launches their rollup. Now it isn’t yet doing “Visa” levels of throughput but it’s close. There’s a lot of work to be done to make operators capable of doing 3000 transactions per second. It’s not point-and-click to just make a high throughput chain. Recall, for example, chains like EOS which sacrifice decentralization for throughput and still only churn out a few more transactions per second than Ethereum. </trollface>





Stuff for developers

Solidity keeps improving. v0.6 led Augur founder Joey Krug to exclaim, “To give you an idea for just how early crypto is, Solidity just now has try/catch statements!”

The post on the techniques EY used to reduce Nightfall’s gas costs is very cool.





Ecosystem

Tornado mixer going live is amazing. I 100% don’t want to downplay the possibility that the mixer has a bug or doesn’t work - though they now have 10 ETH deposits and you can insure away your risk with Nexus Mutual by getting a quote on 10 ETH for tornado.nexusmutual.eth and then limiting your exposure to 10 ETH at a time. The feature improvements are impressive, and it’s impossible to understate how need privacy improvements are.

Sometimes in Ethereum people didn’t want to pay each other at events using crypto because it means exposing so much of your transaction history. Privacy matters, and the Tornado mixer is bringing it.

I don’t want to touch much on the Parity drama. Much of this is “proof is in the pudding” stuff. While some parts of the Ethereum community on Reddit think this is Gavin declaring war (he published an op-ed in Coindesk about how blockchains would go to war with each other in 2020), if they assign clean IP to someone, then I feel comfortable guaranteeing you that the client will be well maintained. If Parity does not do that, then they’ll give credence to the critics.

Meanwhile key management is really getting so much better with Gnosis Safe or Argent. If you haven’t tried them, you should.





Enterprise

Tradeshift Frontiers and Monerium first cross-border euro transaction. “Invoices and purchase orders were issued through Tradeshift smart-contracts and settled using Monerium e-money on-chain.”

Seberino: private blockchains are not pointless because of decentralized administration and complete security histories.

Hyperledger Besu v1.3.8 better loq query performance

Governance and standards

The relatively slow week for enterprise juxtaposed with a very packed non-enterprise is amusing.

Lots of stuff happening in DAO land. Various people are picking up different strands of TheDAO’s vision and experimenting.





Application layer

I think the Affogato sale is very cool, as is their vision for making coffee futures. I’ve bought a few even though I’m not a big coffee drinker. I’d really like to see the Ethereum community support them more. I may buy a token or two and give them away.

Also neat to see Forbes using Unlock. I bought one even though Brave already blocks my ads.

I had missed Burner Machine, which is a neat little concept and way of using crypto as a payment rail.

Also cool to see an oracle solution like Chainlink go into wider production with Synthetic.

And I guess I should have bought more sets on Set Protocol!

Tokens / Business / Regulation

ZimDai is super cool. Wasn’t this supposed to be a big part of what “crypto” about? It’s a long shot, but imagine how incredible it would be for Zimbabweans to have an alternative to their perpetual hyperinflation? Politicians cause inflation by overspending, the folks in Zimbabwe deserve a better option.

Meanwhile I loved Yaniv’s piece about web3 being the next big platform and how we get there. It’s amazing how the pendulum of “conventional wisdom” has swung the other way. This was a nice counterpoint.





General

As always, a bit of a grab bag. In the ‘general’ section I now generally put things involving both very advanced crypto (like the very cool PLONK benchmarks from Aztec Protocol) and beginner tutorials. Both the beginner-friendly pieces are high on the list of most clicked.