Vitalik: Ethereum 2.0 has no unresolved research challenges

Vitalik Buterin : I really don't think there are currently unresolved research challenges. In terms of research, it is mainly "how do we implement it more elegantly and take up less lines of code and fewer edge cases".

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Danny Ryan : There is a need to better understand the incentives and various actors that may be involved in stateless and highly abstract execution models. In order to better understand the relevant design and actively build prototypes to review relevant ideas, the EWASM team of the Ethereum Foundation and the Quilt team of ConsenSys have done a lot of work.

Carl Beekhuizen : Thank you for noting that this date is an informal date 🙂 Launching early next year (beacon chain) is my personal goal, but there is still a lot to do before that! The things we need to accomplish are: a long-running test network (regardless of how this is defined), a formal verification of the deposit contract, and a ready (Eth 2.0) client, but now it looks like everything It will all be completed on time . We also don't want to rush out a software client with a lot of bugs in order to catch up with an arbitrary date.

Danny Ryan : Every (Eth 2.0) client team is doing very well and continues to challenge the limits. I look forward to exciting progress in the coming months, but I also expect the final trip to be long. At the beginning of 2020 (starting the beacon chain) is very realistic and our goal.

Justin Drake : The composability between the pieces is undoubtedly an unknown area, but we have reason to remain optimistic:

• In order to facilitate cross-sharding transactions, all shards are designed to be homogenous (this is different from Polkadot or Cosmos);

• There are some design patterns that abstract the boundaries between slices. These design patterns will be easier to use in a programmable execution engine.

• Due to the verifier's proof of fragmentation, each slice is designed to be friendly to achieve "fast optimistic finality", and the proof of fragmentation is similar to block validation on the current Eth 1.0 chain. That is to say, in practice, since a single slice can quickly achieve finality, all slices can act as a logical blockchain.

• The UI (user interface) layer can also abstract the boundaries between slices.

Danny Ryan : Thank you! I am just trying to get things moving forward, not too concerned about market volatility and those noises.

Justin Drake : There are a few things to note about client diversity:

• More than 6 clients are currently being developed, but 8;
• I expect the client to merge – some clients will probably not be able to survive 2020;
• I anticipate that each client will be specialized – a client will focus on the browser (such as Lodestar), or focus on resource-constrained devices (such as Nimbus), or focus on the enterprise (such as Artemis), or focus on For prototyping (such as Trinity) and so on;
• When the (beacon chain) is started, at least two clients are required to be in production ready state. I expect the advantage of the first move will be strong;
• To some extent, all of the above have occurred on the Eth 1.0 old chain.

Danny Ryan : I think all of this client will do the hard work because Eth 2.0 is not only a purely technical challenge, but also an opportunity to leave a footprint in Ethereum and cryptocurrency . I am very happy to see that there are so many excellent teams doing this difficult job, but recently, I am more focused on finding contributors to do value-added work beyond the core client implementation, such as formal verification, agreement academics. Analysis, testing, light client, web3 interface and developer tools, a verifier client with access to any underlying node and a strong user experience (UX), and more.

Vitalik Buterin : In the past year, it has become quite simple . If you do word counts on the Eth 2.0 specification, there will be fewer words in the current specification than in the Ethereum Yellow Book. There are many things in Eth 2.0 that are much simpler than Eth 1.0. But there are certainly some complications left, and I am very concerned about minimizing complexity.

Justin Drake : Although the path of research is a bit tortuous and difficult to keep up with, the final specification can be said to be simple and straightforward . Expect more educational materials to emphasize the simplicity of current Eth 2.0 designs. Phase 0 requires approximately 1024 lines of code (assuming SHA256 and BLS12-381 are primitives). I expect that Phase 1 and Phase 2 add up to 1024 lines of code (assuming WASM is the primitive).

Justin Drake : When the verifier is fined, he will be expelled. There is another eviction mechanism, that is, when your accumulated (non-slashing) penalty makes your balance lower than 16 ETH, you will also be expelled.

Danny Ryan : You will also lose a certain amount of ETH. The minimum amount currently set is 1 ETH. There are additional penalties if there are other behaviors that meet the penalty conditions in the near future. If more certifiers have been fined recently, you will lose more ETH. If a recent 1/3 or so verifier is fined, the maximum penalty will be imposed, that is, you will lose all pledge ETH.

Vitalik Buterin : The current way is to transfer Eth1.0 as an execution environment into the Eth 2.0 chain. In practice, this means that we will need to perform a hard fork on the Eth1.0 chain to adjust some gas charges (the gas cost of reading the storage or account opcode will rise to 2,000-10,000), after which At some point, we will transfer the state root of the Eth 1.0 chain to the Eth 2.0 system at a block height. My confirmation that the cost of reading the storage/account opcode will increase, contract developers should be aware of this and plan accordingly.

Justin Drake : I expect that there will be industries in the market for staking, such as infrastructure including staking pools (such as centralized pledge hosting services provided by Coinbase, etc., and other decentralized pledges). There are some plug-and-play "validator in a box" solutions. In terms of risk, for a certifier node that is sometimes offline for a short time, the corresponding penalty should be small.

Danny Ryan : Eth 2.0 with shards is expected to handle data availability of approximately 10 MB/s. This is the consensus data in the segmentation chain and guarantees that the data is available in about 2 weeks.

Carl Beekhuizen : I think you are confusing slashing and inactivity leak (the penalty for the verifier being inactive).

Vitalik Buterin : The latest I am most excited about the research at https://ethresear.ch/t/layer-2-state-schemes/5691. The research by Karl Floersch et al. on the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) is also very interesting.

Vitalik Buterin : I don't think we need to worry about the specific numbers right now. (Note: V God refers to the total number of ETHs pledged in the beacon chain and the corresponding ETH annual growth rate and the prover's annual rate of return), regardless of the verifier. Say that the corresponding reward is enough, the network will start.

Justin Drake : At least 2, ideally 3.

Vitalik Buterin : When you are offline, only when more than 1/3 of other certifiers are offline at the same time, the penalty you receive will be great . In addition, the penalty for offline is very small, as long as your online time exceeds 50-67%, then you will be in a net profit state (not including computer costs, etc.). This incentive mechanism is very loose, and the goal is to encourage amateur participants to join in and promote decentralization.

Justin Drake : The way to "pause" to become a verifier is to quit first (this may take only half an hour, but it may take a few days/weeks because there is an exit queuing mechanism) and then (want to re-participate in the verification) Time) It will be activated again.

Vitalik Buterin : I hope so! (Eth 2.0) One of the keys to incentive design is that only when many other certifiers are offline at the same time, the corresponding penalty (whether offline or because of being penalized) is high. Therefore, any bug that does not attack all nodes at the same time will only cost you a small amount of money.

Carl Beekhuizen : Phase 2 is not yet clear, but I hope that the Phase 1 specification will freeze in the fourth quarter of this year.

Carl Beekhuizen : Since there are 1024 sharded chains, 128 certifiers are required in each committee, so at least 131,072 verifiers are required to achieve cross-linking for each shard. If the number of verifiers is less than this number, then some shards will be skipped to ensure that there are 128 certifiers in each committee.

Danny Ryan : The system can handle as low as 64 verifiers. In this case, system security will be significantly reduced, but the protocol can continue to advance technically.

Justin Drake : Building an Eth 2.0 chain on the Eth 1.0 chain would be a bad design decision for the following reasons:

• We will be limited by the current Ethe 1.0 chain gas cap, which will seriously affect the performance of the new chain (for example, 1024 strip chains and pledge 32 ETH will not be validated);

• We will mix the consensus layer and the application layer. This means that the consensus layer will be subject to the DoS vector of the application layer (such as the high gas price);

• We will be subject to the old chain EVM (Ethernet virtual machine), and it is well known that it is very difficult to securely complex complex contracts into the old chain EVM.

• The Eth 1.0 chain cannot support BLS12-381;

• There are other reasons.

Carl Beekhuizen : In the Eth 2.0 chain, more verifiers should not lead to longer finalize time. By using BLS signature aggregation and by grouping verifiers into committees, we are able to accommodate hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of verifiers.

Carl Beekhuizen : If a large participant wants to get a lot of pledge ETH to control the entire network, he will need to buy more than 2/3 of all circulating ETH, and when he buys it will push the ETH price up, so The cost of this attack is very high;

Justin Drake : There will be no mining in Eth 2.0. You may be able to lease the computing power of these GPU mining equipment through platforms such as Golem.

Vitalik Buterin : When the PoS chain begins to carry the PoW chain to ensure safety (this may happen in Phase 1 or Phase 2), then it is safe to reduce the mining bonus of the PoW chain by about 4 times. When the PoW chain is completely stopped, the burst rate will be further reduced.

Justin Drake : Layer 2 expansion solutions (Plasma, Rollups, status channels, etc.) can improve scalability in the short term. Unfortunately, building a Layer 1 solution in 2019 still requires a lot of technical complexity, but it's not impossible!

Vitalik Buterin : As far as I know, the annualized interest rate of ETH on the Compound platform is 0.02%, so we have a big competitive advantage . "The design of pledge ETH on the Compound platform to get 3% interest rate and lend DAI interest rate to 6%" is misleading because 6% is based on USD (US$) and 3% yield is based on ETH's. But with the emergence of more and more staking forms (such as Plamsa, Trubit and other margin games), ETH's pledged interest rate will slide.

Carl Beekhuizen : The transfer of Eth 2.0 coins is only possible by the Stage 1 period, when the exchange will be Eth 2.0. The listing of the exchange will be beneficial to maintain the equivalent between ETH and Eth 2.0.

Carl Beekhuizen : It depends on what you mean by "Ether tokens":

• The verifier can send 32 ETH to the deposit contract, after which the deposit will be transferred to the beacon chain so that the verifier can participate in the beacon chain.

• For those who just want to transfer ETH from the Eth 1.0 chain to the Eth 2.0 chain, the design has not yet been finalized, but there may be a dedicated bridge between the two chains, or through a mortgage contract. First, the purpose;

• It is still too early to talk about the transfer of ERC20/721 tokens on the two chains. If the Eth 2.0 chain has an execution engine like the Eth 1.0 chain, then this transfer will be very convenient, but even without the execution engine, it is possible to achieve the transfer by just copying the state root of the ERC20 token.

Justin Drake : Stage 0 may start as early as January 3, 2020. I think it is likely to be in the first quarter of 2020. A pledge of 32 ETH is required, and the certifier's reward depends on the number of all verifiers, the individual verifier's own performance, and the gas market. I don't think it's surprising that the verifier's annual rate of return is around 10% . I feel most proud of being involved in the construction of this infrastructure that I believe will revolutionize the world in a positive way. The coin chain is not a competitor of Ethereum.

Carl Beekhuizen : All 1024 segmented chains will be launched at once . Increasing the number of possible slice chains (possibly) can create unnecessary complexity. With a large amount of unused capacity, the price of the gas will be lower, so it will attract more users.

Carl Beekhuizen : The Eth 2.0 chain revolutionizes the Eth 1.0 chain, so a better way to upgrade is to implement a completely new chain. The circulation of Eth 2.0 coins does depend to a large extent on how many people convert Eth 1.0 into Eth 2.0. Of course, the Eth 2.0 chain will also issue new coins as a certifier's reward, which will also increase the supply of new coins. But in the end, all Eth 1.0 coins will be converted to Eth 2.0 SGD.

Vitalik Buterin : Are these blockchain platforms really dealing with thousands of transactions per second? Usually my "intuition" is that they boast of throughput that is 10 times their throughput.

Carl Beekhuizen : The goal of Phase 0 is to track the status of the verifier and generate randomness, so it doesn't make much sense to ask about its scalability.

Justin Drake : I don't know which jurisdictions treat ETH tokens on the Eth1.0 chain as securities. Since the ETH tokens on the Eth 2.0 chain are basically the same as the tokens on the chain, the ETH on the new chain. It should not be considered a security.