The Ethereum network is one of the largest and most widely used blockchain networks in the world. in 2021, it is beginning to meet its promise of supporting all the DeFi projects that Web 3.0 promises. It is also one of the world’s largest open source projects with go-ethereum being one of the largest projects on Github. Since its first release in 2015, Ethereum has been making strides towards its ultimate goal of becoming a decentralized global computer that could one day replace many of the centralized applications that we use in everyday life.
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So where do we stand right now in the crypto ecosystem?
ETH 1.0 lasted from 2015 to December 1, 2020 and included 3 stages. ETH 2.0 was released 5 weeks ago and is the fourth stage of the blockchains evolution. Ethereum 2.0 is also called Serenity in some circles. It will be the largest and most comprehensive update ever implemented by the Ethereum community. That community makes up over 3500 of the best computer programmers in the world.
ETHER’s Blockchain has had 4 stages of development.
The first stage of Ethereum was called Frontier. Released in 2015, this was the first live version of the network. Frontier allowed users and developers to mine Ether, build Dapps (DeFi apps) and tools, and experiment with the new platform. Most of the development here went to gaming. Many ideas where beta tested in this phase.
The second stage of Ethereum’s development was Homestead. This update was the full production stage of ETH 2.0. What did it do? It provided many improvements to protocols that will become the foundations of future upgrades and increased transaction speed. The BTC blockchain is a slower chain due to its design and purpose. It takes a minimum of 10 minutes to make confirmations in its blockchain. With Homestead ETHER goal was to get to 15 seconds per confirmation increasing transaction fees tremendously.
The third stage of Ethereum’s development was called Metropolis and this ended on December 1,2020. Metropolis was divided into two releases, Byzantium and Constantinople. Byzantium was released in October of 2017 and was lighter, faster and more secure than the previous versions. Some specific upgrades include more predictable gas prices (cost of transactions on ETH2.0) and easier programming for developers to build out the DeFI space on the ETH 2.0 Monopoly board. Byzantium also improves privacy. Many of the Bitcoin maximalists hammered ETHER because it did not have as tight as privacy as BTC so many people thought it would fail because of this. So far this has not been the case as of January 2021. In fact, in December 2020 ETH 2.0 made over 6 billion dollars per day of transactions safely.
The single most important issue currently facing the Ethereum network is scalability. The Ethereum network supports hundreds of decentralized applications and needs to process a high number of transactions per second. Adding more nodes does not increase the scalability of the network because each node needs to verify each transaction. Increased use of the Ethereum network, including the creation of more Dapps and the execution of more transactions, has led to an on-going increase in the time and cost of transactions. Here in lies ETH 2.0 greatest risk.
The cost of gas on ETH 2.0 since December 1, 2020 has been a hot top in the ETH community. I posted about that in the last blog. I think we need to be cognizant of this. By no means do I think this invalidates ETHER as a part of your portfolio. I think you need to be aware of the risks that ETHER has.
The Ethereum blockchain processes about three to four times as many transactions as Bitcoin. It’s still not enough, however, to meet rising user demand for the cryptocurrency and prevent network congestion. We can see transaction speed off each chain right now using this : HYPERLINK
Why is this a big deal? ETH 2.0 is aiming to replace Paypal and Visa in the DeFi space. Can they do it right now? No. Why? Ethereum network runs slower and less convenient to use right now. In a speed test run in 2021, the network only managed 15 transactions per second (various sources have stated anywhere between 12 and 45 transactions per second over the last year). In comparison, centralized networks such as PayPal and Visa regularly perform 193 and 1667 transactions respectively, and Visa’s maximum capacity is close to 24,000. For the network to achieve mass adoption, efforts to massively increase scalability are central to the development of Ethereum 2.0.
How are the programmers going to fix this? After investigating several other options, the Ethereum team settled on a process called sharding as the best solution for network scalability. Off-chain solutions like plasma chains and state channels will also likely be used to take load off of the main network and further increase scalability. No one knows if this will work as of January 2021.
What are some other risks?
Another major issue that will be addressed by ETH 2.0 is efficiency and environmental sustainability. Like Bitcoin and many other blockchain networks, Ethereum currently relies on a proof of work (PoW) consensus protocol to ensure the security of its network. PoW systems involve a number of miners who own computer hardware connected to a blockchain network. Miners are rewarded for putting their hardware to use by the network.
A major benefit of PoW systems is that verifying whether or not a new block belongs to the chain is a very fast and relatively simple process. However, in order to ensure the security of the network and prevent fraud, it is computationally expensive for miners to find the correct hash input. What are the legal risks of screwing this up?
Read this paper from crypto lawyers. It appears this is a big issue for the blockchain, the developers and the exchanges who use BTC or ETH 2.0 for transactions. This aspect o f property flow through blockchains is something to monitor. https://craigwright.net/blog/law-regulation/the-property-flaw-of-lightning/
One of the reasons BTC blockchain is not being used for transactions as much is the speed in which it works but the security of this network is second to none. This means financial institutions may favor one over the other initially.
In ETH 2.0 this is exacerbated by the fact that only one miner will find the correct hash, so the work done by all the others is not actually used. As a result, PoW consensus requires a huge amount of computational power and electricity and is very inefficient. PoW protocols are important because they enabled the creation of early blockchain networks, but they are very inefficient from an energy standpoint too. In the current political environment this will also slow adoption unless it is improved.
In 2019 each transaction on the Ethereum network uses about 29 kwh (Kilowatt hours), enough electricity to power an average American household for 24 hours! The electricity used by Ethereum mines could power 652,669 American households every year. Ethereum mining annually uses about the same amount of energy as the country of Bolivia. This is obviously a major issue that is actively being managed with ETH2.0.
This, right now is the biggest risk to ETH 2.0 in my opinion in January 2021. To solve this problem ETHER community is moving from a PoW to PoS design transition. ETH 2.0 is in design to transition the network from a proof of work protocol to a proof of stake (PoS) protocol called Casper, which seeks to solve this issue of efficiency and sustainability. This transition will become increasingly important because of the difficulty bomb mining adjustment that was introduced in 2017 through the Byzantium update. The bomb will make mining Ether more and more difficult until it will eventually become infeasible. This also needs a solution if ETH 2.0 is going to run the world of DeFi going forward.
So what are the advantages and disadvantages of a Proof of Stake blockchain for ETH2.0?
n addition to being inefficient, PoW blockchains are susceptible to market monopolization because they bestow unfair advantages on actors with more resources. This is a problem considering Web 2.0 companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple have tons of money and resources and want to control the internet. DeFi is aiming to limit corporate power and transfer that power back to the public. This is why ETH 2.0 is a powerful hedge to Monopoly power and why whomever builds the killer DeFi apps on its back will likely have valuations that exceed tthe Web 2.0 companies. DeFi companies will actively put those companies out of business by decentralizing how they can do business.
Wealthy and powerful individuals and organizations can afford many faster and more powerful computers which gives them a much higher chance of successfully mining each available token. About 65% of bitcoin mining is done by 5 huge mining groups who could theoretically join together to control more than 50% of the market. This has created a situation where bitcoin and other blockchain networks are not nearly as decentralized as they were originally intended which endangers their independence and utility. Recently this has changed with more miners and more countries now coming on line in 2021.
Proof of Stake first emerged in 2012 as an attempt to solve these issues of efficiency, cost and centralization. In fact, the Ethereum team planned on transitioning to PoS from the very inception of the project, but has only more recently (2020) laid out a plan to do so with Casper.
In a PoS system, the entire mining process is made virtual, removing the need for much expensive and inefficient hardware. The expenditure of energy is replaced by economic incentives and game theory as a means to secure and validate. In PoS, “miners” are replaced by “validators” who all posses tokens that are native to the network. These tokens will be considered gas to run on the ETHER network.
For each proposed block, validators stake a portion of their coins on a block which they think will be a valid addition to the chain. If that block gets appended, it will be added to the chain and any validator who bet on it will be granted an award proportional to their bet. Since there is no block award in a PoS system, validators are rewarded with transaction fees. Right now in January of 2021, transaction fees for certain transactions are quite expensive. This should not shock anyone, because the ETH 2.0 network just turned on, so without a ton of users prices will be initially high until more transactions are made and prices should fall. This can be several thousand times more cost effective and energy efficient than a PoW system. This makes it scaleable so it can compete and eventually replace Paypal or Visa. I think it more likely that ETH 2.0 will be absorbed by these companies to run all their transactions on it. This will give ETH 2.0 the volume it needs to succeed.
What are the some other risks we need to consider?
The final major issue that will be addressed by ETH 2.0 is speed and usability. This is related to but not the same as, the issue of scalability that will be addressed by sharding.
What is sharding? Sharding is a technique in blockchain that seeks to achieve scalability within a blockchain network. The process of sharding seeks to split a blockchain network into separate shards, that contain their own data, separate from other shards.
The introduction of sharding should remove the most significant bottleneck for transaction speed and throughput, but another bottleneck is caused by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) itself. The EVM is essentially the underlying structure of Ethereum that executes code and allows the network to function correctly. The EVM is responsible for the internal state of the Ethereum network and for all of its computations. The EVM also ensures that the following are accurate: account information such as balances, current gas price, addresses and block information. Furthermore, the machine must keep track of the following components: Block Information, Storage State, Account State and Runtime Environment Information. The Virtual Machine also deals with all Ethereum smart contracts which are written in Solidity/Vyper and compiled into unique EVM bytecode. The contracts are then executed by each node on the network.
Because it is responsible for so many important aspects of the Ethereum network, the speed with which the Virtual Machine is able to perform tasks has a major affect on the overall speed and usability of the network itself. The solution to this bottleneck advanced by ETH 2.0 is called Ewasm. The risk there is that Google developers are involved in this network upgrade. Others are also involved to help mitigate the this risk. Engineers from Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple have been added to make sure no corporate bugs are entered at this change to centralize the blockchain. I just do not trust any of these companies right now.
But if they get this right I view ETH 2.0 like the Panama canal. It is a huge engineering project that will change the world conducts its business globally. This canal reshaped the economic landscape of many states in the USA and with Countries in the Far East.
More than a century ago, the opening of the Panama Canal revolutionized international trade by making it much quicker and easier to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Having easy access to a large number of trading partners is an important determinant of where economic activity is located. It also shaped population growth in the USA.
The Panama Canal was recently widened and reopened for business in 2016 as you can see above. This event coincided with the 100th anniversary of the canal. The expansion, named the “Third Set of Locks Project,” enabled the canal to double its capacity by adding a new traffic lane. This will allow ships that are wider and deeper to travel through the lanes and locks.
I view ETH 2.0 to this event in the Panama canal because the goals are quite similar.
Serenity/ETH2.0 is also under construction to satisfy several more general design goals. Because of the many new and complex systems that will arise from the introduction of Casper and Sharding, one of the main design goals of Eth 2.0 is to reduce network complexity as much as possible, even if this leads to some loss of efficiency. This is possible because the massive increase in throughput and efficiency allowed for by sharding, Casper and Ewasm will outbalance a small reduction in efficiency in order to mitigate the additional complexity necessitated by these same systems. Another major design goal is to use cryptography and design techniques that allow for the participation of a large set of validators, both in total and per transaction. A third goal in the same vein, is to create a system that allows a standard consumer laptop to process and validate an individual shard. Both of these goals are meant to ensure that the network remains secure and decentralized so no single government or CEO can co-opt it.
WILL ETH 2.0 BE PROTECTED FROM A CME OR ELECTROMAGNETIC WAR?
Serenity/ETH 2.0 has two long-term design goals created in anticipation of potential issues that may arise in the future. The first is to design the release in such a way that the network will be able to remain live in the event of a major partition or if a very large percentage of nodes goes offline simultaneously. In his talk at Devcon 2018, Ethereum developer Justin Drake explained how the team wants ETH 2.0 to be able to “survive WW3” or a similar situation in which up to 80 percent of nodes go offline at once.
The developers are thinking about CCP and the USA relationships.
For example, one or more major climate change related disasters could knock out a large portion of nodes within hours, or a major power such as China or the United States could decide to ban Ethereum and other blockchain networks, and try to eliminate the nodes in their country.
ETH 2.0 is being built with geopolitical forethought.
The other contingency that ETH 2.0 anticipates is the advent of quantum computing. There is currently an ongoing tech race between the United States, China, and other major powers and corporations to be the first to invent a production quantum computer. At this point the question is not if, but when. Whenever they do come along, quantum computers will be exponentially more powerful than even the most advanced traditional computers. This will render most existing cyber security, including encryption and blockchain tech, relatively defenseless and easily hack-able. It is therefore important for new and future blockchain networks to do everything possible (within the limits of traditional binary computing) to protect against the eventuality of quantum computers. The final design goal for ETH 2.0, as laid out in the Ethereum github repo is: “to select all components such that they are either quantum secure or can be easily swapped out for quantum secure counterparts when available.
On December 1, 2020 ETH 2.0 went live. It will be released in parts as well. Phase 0 will feature a beacon chain PoS system. It will not yet support DeFi Dapps but will lay the foundation for the following phases. Phase 1 will supports Dapps and introduce shards as data chains. Here is where operability risks begin.
Phase 2 will be fully sharded, will enable state execution and will allow for smart contracts. At this point, ETH 2.0 will have all of the major features discussed above. Phase 3 and beyond will consist of iteration, improvement and additional tech. Once each phase is implemented, ETH 2.0 is expected to have the following features: fully sharded blockchain, pure PoS consensus protocol, faster time to synchronous confirmation of about 8–16 seconds and “economic finality” that can be achieved in 10–20 minutes.
Ethereans want ETH 2.0 to become “The world computer as it’s really meant to be.” Investors in ETHER want it to work as designed……..ideas are great but without execution they are deleted to losses.
If you want to begin in crypto start here with BlockFi. https://blockfi.com/?ref=34f06254
Want to earn a safe and easy passive income with your crypto purchases? Then try out Blockfi! You can earn: 6% on your Bitcoin balance and 5.25% Ethereum, 5% Litecoin and 9.3% dollars $USDT
CITES:
- The Beginner’s Guide to Ethereum’s Roadmap. https://hackernoon.com/the-beginners-guide-to-ethereum-s-2020-roadmap-2ac5d2dd4881
- EtherScan. https://etherscan.io
- ETH 2.0 Explained. https://cryptocurrencyfacts.com/ethereum-2-0-explained
- Ethereum 2.0. https://medium.com/rocket-pool/ethereum-2-0-76d0c8a76605
- Ethereum Energy Consumption Index. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
- ETH 2.0 Explained. https://cryptocurrencyfacts.com/ethereum-2-0-explained
- Ethereum Virtual Machine Explained. https://www.mycryptopedia.com/ethereum-virtual-machine-explained
- ETH 2.0 Specs. https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs
- ETH 2.0 Randomness Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI
- “Devcon Keynote Talk.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km9BaxRm1wA
- “Ethereum 2.0 Launch Really Not So Far Away.” https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-20-launch-really-not-so-far-away-says-vitalik-buterin-in-devcon4-keynote
Works Cited
Asolo, Bisade. “Ethereum Virtual Machine Explained.” Mycryptopedia. November 1, 2018. https://www.mycryptopedia.com/ethereum-virtual-machine-explained/
Buterin, Vitalik. “Keynote Talk.” Filmed November 2018 at Devcon, Prague, Czech Republic. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km9BaxRm1wA
Cryptofacts. “Eth 2.0 Explained.” CryptoCurrency Facts. Accessed November 10, 2018. https://cryptocurrencyfacts.com/ethereum-2-0-explained/
“Eth 2.0 Specs.” Github. Accessed November 14, 2018. https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs
“Ethereum Energy Consumption Index.” Digiconomist. Accessed February 18, 2019. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
“EtherScan.” Homepage. Accessed Jan 5, 2019. https://etherscan.io/
Drake, Justin. “Eth 2.0 Randomness Talk.” Filmed November 2018 at Devcon, Prague, Czech Republic. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI
Langley, Darren. “Ethereum 2.0.” Medium. August 7, 2018. https://medium.com/rocket-pool/ethereum-2-0-76d0c8a76605
Langley, Darren. “Ethereum 2.0 — Who’s Building It?” Medium. September 6, 2018. https://medium.com/rocket-pool/ethereum-2-0-whos-building-it-54a735442e
Karnjanaprakorn, Michael. “The Beginner’s Guide to Ethereum’s Roadmap.” Hackernoon. December 7, 2017. https://hackernoon.com/the-beginners-guide-to-ethereum-s-2020-roadmap-2ac5d2dd4881
Suberg, William. “Ethereum 2.0 Launch Really Not So Far Away.” Cointelegraph. November 1, 2018. https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-20-launch-really-not-so-far-away-says-vitalik-buterin-in-devcon4-keynote