Week in Ethereum News January 5, 2020 annotated edition

Another relatively slow week over New Years Day.

I committed to doing 6 of these annotated editions. I believe this is the 4th. Feedback has been positive, but definitely not to the point where I’m convinced this is how I should spend my time. Though mainly the signal I use is how many RTs the annotated edition gets. I suppose you could also support Week in Ethereum News in the Gitcoin CLR if you want me to keep doing these

Eth1

Muir Glacier successfully hardforked on Jan 2nd.

Nethermind v1.4.2 – proper config file for Muir Glacier

Update Parity clients to v2.6.8beta and v2.5.13stable. An attacker found that Parity was only validating block header and so was crashing Parity nodes by sending valid header with invalid body

An overview of stateless Ethereum

Protocol changes necessary for 4MB witness size: binary tree, 3 gas per byte for calling contracts, gas costs go up for SLOAD to 2000. EXTCODESIZE, BALANCE, and *CALL go up to 2400

Data on witness size using binary tries

It’s interesting that an improper config file is also what hit Parity right before Istanbul, and now it hits Nethermind at Muir Glacier. To Nethermind’s credit, that client is rapidly under construction and there are rapid releases, often multiple in a week.

No one is quite sure that there was an attack on Parity, but it seems more likely given what occurred. Basically they were incorrectly validating blocks, and so someone figured out they could crash Parity’s client. It could have been a buggy node somewhere, but unlikely. Seems like someone realized and thought they’d point out the bug in a conspicuous manner, a la devops199.

Meanwhile work on stateless Eth1 continued. There was some private conversation about why witness size didn’t go down more with binary tries. Vitalik tried to sketch out how to get to a manageable witness size, and the overview of stateless Ethereum is a nice overview of what it all means. So start in the order they’re listed there.





Eth2

Jim’s link was the most clicked this link, by far. Which is funny because I ran a twitter poll with the top 4 clicked links at that time, and of course in the twitter poll his link came in last. The miswisdom of crowds! Also amusing because I almost did not include it in this issue. It seemed not particularly new, and is a bit more bearish on shipping schedule. But it was a good overview, and let’s be honest, software rarely ships on time.

Meanwhile Vitalik refined his meta EE idea. This is something for phase2.





Stuff for developers

Some neat stuff this week. A bugfix Solidity release, relevant to Yul and the ABIencoderv2. Victor Maia’s release of an EVM compiler for his Formality language is very interesting if you’re into functional programming.

Jonny Rhea’s messing around with hardcoding machine language classifiers in ewasm as a sort of EE is pretty interesting stuff too.





Ecosystem

Tornado launching their mixer is a highlight of 2019 for me. Privacy is such a big issue, and being able to have some ETH that doesn’t show every transaction you’ve ever done is pretty huge. Also the frontend is sweet.

Vitalik wrote a piece for Nakamoto.com which largely answered some of the pedantic criticism he got for a Twitter reply. The funny thing is that the Bitcoin maxis criticizing him were largely the ones misinterpreting, since what Vitalik said was precisely correct.

Also the funniest part of Nakamoto is how triggered some Bitcoin maximalists got. It’s a general crypto site, but in the way Balaji views crypto: a protest system, but with BTC as the base layer. It’s not the way I see crypto - I’d argue BTC is obsolete tech that will soon be relegated to the trashbin of history - but it’s a consistent position.

And the maximalists were so offended, it was pretty amusing. I’d argue it was the opposite: Balaji got a bunch of people not viewed as Bitcoiners to agree that they are holding BTC long-term. The maxis should have been thrilled!

I don’t hold Bitcoin (and certainly not for the long-term!) so that pretty much would exclude me.

Enterprise

UN Secretary General says his institution must embrace blockchain

UN pilot to track cashmere supply chain

At what point do we start the “Ethereum, not blockchain” mantra? Up until this point, 99% of the time that “blockchain” has made the news, it has been about Ethereum.

Either way, the UN appears to be on board. And yes, of course that UN pilot was on Ethereum

Governance

Vocdoni is a very interesting project. They have done a lot of design work into thinking through how to make it a signalling app, with “voting” and “governance” as broadly defined as possible. I’d generally be skeptical about that approach except that I expect that they will use it on the ground in Catalunya, so I imagine they will have the right ideas and iteration necessary.

And it’s undeniable that MolochDAO crushed it this year. They started small, built something that had a very defined use case, and now they’re extending it and have users and a community that wants to continue pushing it forward. More projects could learn from that example.

Application layer

I’m long on record being a skeptic of tokenized ticketing. This is an interesting project, a small pilot from UEFA to see how it goes (ie, if I recall correctly, there will be a few million VIP tickets for the Euros, which gets you into hospitality tents before the game).

Uniswap is another huge story of 2019. It launched at Devcon last year, so perhaps the crazy growth is less shocking than it seems, but it’s now hard to imagine now being able to go and easily exchange tokens on Uniswap.

Meanwhile some other cool stuff, like BULVRD doing a tokenized Waze, undercollateralized loans (!), automated token vesting and CSGO skin trading.

General

It’s sad how many Youtube accounts got hacked and all their videos got deleted while scammers tried to impersonate people in crypto. A few tried to impersonate Ethereum Foundation, leading to a few outraged r/Ethereum posts this weeks from fans of hacked Youtubers who thought Ethereum was the one who hacked their favorite Youtuber.

While writing this I just realized that there is likely a link between Nikolai’s donation of 3200 MKR (to be 10k MKR if he’s happy with the program) and Maker Foundation giving the trademarks and IP to the Dai Foundation. Before the big Maker blowup last year, Nikolai had published an admonition to follow the money.

Finally it’s always amusing to me how Week in Ethereum News is not really a beginner-friendly publication (hopefully the annotated edition is a bit more noob-friendly?) and yet whenever I put something that is a beginner’s guide, it gets a lot of clicks.



Something for me to think about, I’d like to help do a better job communicating Ethereum to people.