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Can anyone give a TLDR of what is significant about Ethereum 2.0 for those of us who don't follow this stuff much? As blockchain tech goes, Ethereum always see

Can anyone give a TLDR of what is significant about Ethereum 2.0 for those of us who don't follow this stuff much? As blockchain tech goes, Ethereum always seemed the most interesting.

sshb 6y ago
Not tldr, but explanation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q
seibelj 6y ago
Beginning of switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus, which will end the mining process for Ethereum and switch to securing the network by locking up funds, drastically reducing the amount of energy used to secure the network. As a side effect of the consensus change, the amount of transactions per second will scale massively. There is not universal agreement among blockchain enthusiasts that Proof of Stake is as secure as Proof of Work, but many currencies such as Cosmos and Polkadot have already implemented Proof of Stake without security issues.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  any idea on the increase in transactions per second/month/some time period? The things that have stopped me from getting into btc/eth are: - scaling issues (it can't be used as a currency if this isn't fixed) - power issues (would be nice if we didn't create a huge pointless energy sink if we could avoid it) - the amount of footguns in ethereum (I think the language is too permissive) It looks like this solves at least 2 of the three!
  - seibelj 6y ago
    At least 1000 transactions per second if not more. In terms of language security, it is possible to use a verified subset of the language in order to avoid bugs, as you can with any Turing-complete language. Few currently do, however.
    - hardwaresofton 6y ago
      Thanks -- yeah the language thing I guess is much harder to change, but I can protect from that by just sticking to relatively simple transactions, or maybe if some sort of professional review/audit agency would spring up...
  - DennisP 6y ago
    There are basically two big things in Ethereum's scaling roadmap. One is sharding, so each node only has to process a fraction of all transactions. Initially there will be 64 shards, but it's designed to allow up to 1024. As individual nodes get more powerful, both the number of shards and the amount processed by each shard increases, for quadratic scaling. The other part, which is on Ethereum mainnet already, is a layer-2 idea called rollups, which store transactions on chain in a very compressed format without losing security guarantees. There are several rollup systems, capable on today's Ethereum of doing 1000 to 9000 simple tx/sec. Once both systems are live, total capacity will be 20K to 100K tx/sec, not counting the quadratic improvements. On the research side, there's also work to make data validation more efficient by replacing merkle trees with something more compact, like polynomial commitments. That would add another 10X factor to rollup scaling. Regarding footguns, people are working on more rigorous languages than Solidity that still compile to the EVM. So far their compilers aren't as solid so they don't get much production use yet.
    - hardwaresofton 6y ago
      Thanks for the summary of the current state of the art -- last I looked at this sharding/federated-chain stuff was still only research grade for bitcoin as a whole. If Ethereum is ready to productize that's amazing news. Anything more than ~3000 tx/sec will be a game changer and maybe ethereum will finally deliver on the promise of usability as currency.
kolinko 6y ago
It is powered by proof of stake, which means no asic miners, and possibly quicker blocks. A new virtual machine for smart contracts (EWASM instead of EVM) giving better contract analysis options, and possibly higher sync speeds due to optimisations. Also, sharding - so multiple jndependent blockchains, that should fix the scalability. If I’m not mistaken, this release is not yet a full blown new chain, but just a partially functional one, designed to test stabiloty and safety. Disclaimer - I’m a bit out of loop, so I meay be slightly wrong somewhere.
- mratsim 6y ago
  The VM for smart contract is not set. The roadmap has changed for the phases after this launch so that Eth1 contracts and the Eth1 chain can run on Eth2 so that the past years of Eth1 development are not thrown away. Reading on the roadmap: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... Disclaimer, this roadmap is valid as of today Dec 1st 2020 but it might have change a couple of months from now.
  - kolinko 6y ago
    Ah, good to know, thanks. I was a bit out of the loop for the past year. I wouldn't mind staying with EVM, since EWASM doesn't seem to offer much significant improvement (static jumps only, really).
- antihero 6y ago
  Is EWASM basically just webassembly running on Ethereum?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fisf 6y ago
    Basically the deterministic subset of web assembly.
- 6y ago
jules-jules 6y ago
You can check out the current roadmap here https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/#roadmap https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/#roadmap
nootropicat 6y ago
Multiple aspects. PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW while being about 4000x cheaper to run and sustainably decentralized. Sharding (along with rollups) allows for a truly global scale platform - over 100k TPS, potentially 1M, while still running on normal computers in people's homes. PoS is a requirement for sharding, as dividing security under PoW would make each shard too easy to attack. Last but not least, full eth2 turns eth into a positive yield asset, a share in ethereum (real income depends on fees paid by users - ethereum already dominates). https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ To not overhype, the current launch is really an incentivized testnet only for PoS itself - real ethereum still runs on PoW as it was. It's important because it shows that after long delays eth2 is finally starting to happen, and because consensus itself is like a car that can drive without transporting anything or anyone - not very useful at the moment, but changes required to make it useful are relatively small compared to building the car from the ground up.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  > PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW Uh, why do you say that? The security of PoS in fact ought to be much LOWER than the security of PoW: The goal of requiring proof of work is that you cannot just send multiple versions of the same transaction into different areas of the network to double-spend your money - because you need to commit work for producing a block, and due to consuming energy you can't fake that. Well, you can compute two (or more) blocks in parallel, but then you'll spend half of your available CPU (or ASIC nowadays) cycles on each block, thus cutting your speed in half. So the non-malicious competitors on the network will produce more blocks meanwhile because they're not splitting their computation power, and thus your fake blocks will get invalidated because they're on the shorter chain. With PoS on the other hand you can create as many fake blocks as you want and spam them to the network. The only security is the hope that the random network topology arbitrarily results in the double-spending blocks arriving at the targets under attack after the other blocks arrive. But if you run thousands of nodes on the cloud and thus have better network connectivity than the victims you can make your double-spend blocks arrive first at the victims. So: - PoW: Relies on physical limits, you need to have physical hardware and physical energy to conduct an attack. - PoS: Relies on the network connectivity of the attacker being hopefully worse than the connectivity of the non-malicious network. Who can guarantee that? Nobody.
DennisP 6y ago
It's not the first proof of stake blockchain, but it's the first that allows hundreds of thousands of nodes to fully participate, while also having high security and rapid finality. This is only possible because of math that was developed three years ago. https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910 https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910 In proof of stake, mining equipment and electricity consumption is replaced by the cryptocurrency itself. You put up your currency as a bond, get rewarded more for running the network, and lose your bond if you misbehave. The other big advance for ETH2 will be sharding, so each node doesn't have to process every transaction. But that's not the part that launched today.
- brightball 6y ago
  So will this be a new currency or will existing ETH switch to it?
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Existing ETH will switch to it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

Can anyone give a TLDR of what is significant about Ethereum 2.0 for those of us who don't follow this stuff much? As blockchain tech goes, Ethereum always seemed the most interesting.

sshb 6y ago

Not tldr, but explanation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q

seibelj 6y ago

Beginning of switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus, which will end the mining process for Ethereum and switch to securing the network by locking up funds, drastically reducing the amount of energy used to secure the network. As a side effect of the consensus change, the amount of transactions per second will scale massively. There is not universal agreement among blockchain enthusiasts that Proof of Stake is as secure as Proof of Work, but many currencies such as Cosmos and Polkadot have already implemented Proof of Stake without security issues.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
any idea on the increase in transactions per second/month/some time period? The things that have stopped me from getting into btc/eth are: - scaling issues (it can't be used as a currency if this isn't fixed) - power issues (would be nice if we didn't create a huge pointless energy sink if we could avoid it) - the amount of footguns in ethereum (I think the language is too permissive) It looks like this solves at least 2 of the three!
- seibelj 6y ago
  At least 1000 transactions per second if not more. In terms of language security, it is possible to use a verified subset of the language in order to avoid bugs, as you can with any Turing-complete language. Few currently do, however.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    Thanks -- yeah the language thing I guess is much harder to change, but I can protect from that by just sticking to relatively simple transactions, or maybe if some sort of professional review/audit agency would spring up...
- DennisP 6y ago
  There are basically two big things in Ethereum's scaling roadmap. One is sharding, so each node only has to process a fraction of all transactions. Initially there will be 64 shards, but it's designed to allow up to 1024. As individual nodes get more powerful, both the number of shards and the amount processed by each shard increases, for quadratic scaling. The other part, which is on Ethereum mainnet already, is a layer-2 idea called rollups, which store transactions on chain in a very compressed format without losing security guarantees. There are several rollup systems, capable on today's Ethereum of doing 1000 to 9000 simple tx/sec. Once both systems are live, total capacity will be 20K to 100K tx/sec, not counting the quadratic improvements. On the research side, there's also work to make data validation more efficient by replacing merkle trees with something more compact, like polynomial commitments. That would add another 10X factor to rollup scaling. Regarding footguns, people are working on more rigorous languages than Solidity that still compile to the EVM. So far their compilers aren't as solid so they don't get much production use yet.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    Thanks for the summary of the current state of the art -- last I looked at this sharding/federated-chain stuff was still only research grade for bitcoin as a whole. If Ethereum is ready to productize that's amazing news. Anything more than ~3000 tx/sec will be a game changer and maybe ethereum will finally deliver on the promise of usability as currency.

kolinko 6y ago

It is powered by proof of stake, which means no asic miners, and possibly quicker blocks. A new virtual machine for smart contracts (EWASM instead of EVM) giving better contract analysis options, and possibly higher sync speeds due to optimisations. Also, sharding - so multiple jndependent blockchains, that should fix the scalability. If I’m not mistaken, this release is not yet a full blown new chain, but just a partially functional one, designed to test stabiloty and safety. Disclaimer - I’m a bit out of loop, so I meay be slightly wrong somewhere.

mratsim 6y ago
The VM for smart contract is not set. The roadmap has changed for the phases after this launch so that Eth1 contracts and the Eth1 chain can run on Eth2 so that the past years of Eth1 development are not thrown away. Reading on the roadmap: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... Disclaimer, this roadmap is valid as of today Dec 1st 2020 but it might have change a couple of months from now.
- kolinko 6y ago
  Ah, good to know, thanks. I was a bit out of the loop for the past year. I wouldn't mind staying with EVM, since EWASM doesn't seem to offer much significant improvement (static jumps only, really).
antihero 6y ago
Is EWASM basically just webassembly running on Ethereum?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fisf 6y ago
  Basically the deterministic subset of web assembly.
6y ago

jules-jules 6y ago

You can check out the current roadmap here https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/#roadmap https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/#roadmap

nootropicat 6y ago

Multiple aspects. PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW while being about 4000x cheaper to run and sustainably decentralized. Sharding (along with rollups) allows for a truly global scale platform - over 100k TPS, potentially 1M, while still running on normal computers in people's homes. PoS is a requirement for sharding, as dividing security under PoW would make each shard too easy to attack. Last but not least, full eth2 turns eth into a positive yield asset, a share in ethereum (real income depends on fees paid by users - ethereum already dominates). https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ To not overhype, the current launch is really an incentivized testnet only for PoS itself - real ethereum still runs on PoW as it was. It's important because it shows that after long delays eth2 is finally starting to happen, and because consensus itself is like a car that can drive without transporting anything or anyone - not very useful at the moment, but changes required to make it useful are relatively small compared to building the car from the ground up.

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
> PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW Uh, why do you say that? The security of PoS in fact ought to be much LOWER than the security of PoW: The goal of requiring proof of work is that you cannot just send multiple versions of the same transaction into different areas of the network to double-spend your money - because you need to commit work for producing a block, and due to consuming energy you can't fake that. Well, you can compute two (or more) blocks in parallel, but then you'll spend half of your available CPU (or ASIC nowadays) cycles on each block, thus cutting your speed in half. So the non-malicious competitors on the network will produce more blocks meanwhile because they're not splitting their computation power, and thus your fake blocks will get invalidated because they're on the shorter chain. With PoS on the other hand you can create as many fake blocks as you want and spam them to the network. The only security is the hope that the random network topology arbitrarily results in the double-spending blocks arriving at the targets under attack after the other blocks arrive. But if you run thousands of nodes on the cloud and thus have better network connectivity than the victims you can make your double-spend blocks arrive first at the victims. So: - PoW: Relies on physical limits, you need to have physical hardware and physical energy to conduct an attack. - PoS: Relies on the network connectivity of the attacker being hopefully worse than the connectivity of the non-malicious network. Who can guarantee that? Nobody.

DennisP 6y ago

It's not the first proof of stake blockchain, but it's the first that allows hundreds of thousands of nodes to fully participate, while also having high security and rapid finality. This is only possible because of math that was developed three years ago. https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910 https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910 In proof of stake, mining equipment and electricity consumption is replaced by the cryptocurrency itself. You put up your currency as a bond, get rewarded more for running the network, and lose your bond if you misbehave. The other big advance for ETH2 will be sharding, so each node doesn't have to process every transaction. But that's not the part that launched today.

brightball 6y ago
So will this be a new currency or will existing ETH switch to it?
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Existing ETH will switch to it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]