Ethereum protocol change

Let's dive into both to get a more precise understanding of what they are and the functions they serve. Proof-of-work vs. What is a consensus mechanism? A consensus mechanism is a foolproof algorithm used in blockchain technology. This protocol ensures synchronization across a network and verifies the legitimacy of cryptocurrency transactions. A consensus mechanism's primary task is to ensure all transactions are valid among all its distributed nodes.

For example, Bitcoin's consensus mechanism is called PoW and involves miners who use complex computational power to mine and validate new blocks on Bitcoin's blockchain. A miner's effort is known as PoW, ensuring that the transaction is legitimate.

What is proof-of-work? PoW mandates that all participants on a blockchain verify transactions using nodes, which are their own computer systems. Exogenous miners compete to be the one who can add new transactions to the blockchain for a reward.

What is proof-of-stake? Ethereum's PoS protocol requires validators to hold at least 32 ETH to ensure the security of operations. This method reduces the demand for complex and costly hardware because users don't require expensive equipment to validate transactions. PoS also ensures lower energy usage, allowing more individuals to become Ethereum validators.

Why does this change matter? PoW expends large amounts of energy to mine new blocks and validate crypto transactions. Plenty of these transactions have seen a significant amount of computational power squandered due to processing failure or inability to solve complex problems required to mine blocks.

PoS will decrease the time and expenses involved in such activities. As a result, Ethereum transaction fees will also reduce, making ether and other crypto assets more accessible and affordable to the average user. All this leads to higher accessibility. The more affordable ETH is, the more participants there are.

An increase in users sees more verified transactions, which leads to an effective growth rate for Ethereum 2. Sharding Sharding involves splitting a single blockchain into multiple consensus groups called shards. Instead of overloading one blockchain, sharding divides the computational power required to process and validate transactions, making the entire network more sustainable and efficient.

As a result, the work is spread out, and no single node has to carry the burden of using its computing power to maintain the blockchain. Each node keeps records on its shard. Validators, the individuals behind each node, constantly switch between shards to reduce the chance of tampering. At the center of Ethereum 2. The Beacon Chain creates new shards, verifies them, and rewards validators with ETH to keep the shards secure. Its implementation is in full flow, releasing in three phases: Phase 0: Phase 0 saw the launch of the Beacon Chain at the core of Ethereum 2.

This terminology, they believe, better reflected their goals for the platform. However, many crypto investors and enthusiasts still refer to post-merge Ethereum as Ethereum 2. Staking requires users to lock up a certain amount of cryptocurrency to participate in the transaction verification process. In a proof-of-stake model, an algorithm selects which validator gets to add the next block to a blockchain-based on how much cryptocurrency the validator has staked. Investors must stake at least 32 ETH to become an Ethereum validator.

There are currently more than , Ethereum validators. The more ETH each validator stakes, the more likely that validator is to produce blocks. Each time a validator produces blocks, the validator earns rewards in Ethereum for handling validation duties. But individual investors can also join staking pools, which are collections of Ethereum stakers who combine their resources and split the rewards. Most large cryptocurrency exchanges also provide staking services for investors who are not willing or able to commit 32 ETH on their own.

Ethereum vs.

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This hard fork also had a follow-on effect, resulting in a consensus fork due to an improper implementation of EIP included in Spurious Dragon which Go-ethereum and Parity each did incorrectly. According to a ChainSecurity report , EIP introduces the risk of reentrancy attacks for some contracts.

TrailOfBits gives a more detailed analysis and provides a list of potentially affected contracts. When it was discovered that the difficulty bomb was about to have an impact on the network, the 76th Core Developers Conference quickly accepted EIP and incorporated it into the Muir Glacier hard fork. Hard fork decision-making process changes How is the hard fork decided?

EIP attempted to standardize the formal process of forking, but it was not accepted. Although this article cannot represent the discussion of the hard fork decision-making process in the Ethereum community, it is clear that the hard fork decision-making process in Ethereum has changed. Before the hard fork of Berlin, developers first determine the time of the hard fork, and then decide which EIPs to include, and then implement and test them.

Its core point is to separate the acceptance of EIP from the hard fork. The core developers focus on the recognition, implementation and testing of a single EIP. Although it has not yet been found during the writing process how the process was accepted by the Ethereum core developers, the Berlin hard fork deprecated HFM in favor of the process proposed by Martin. Due to the adoption of the new process, the last-minute changes did not have much of an impact on the hard fork and ended up going on schedule.

Miners have the right to change the block space cap by a maximum of 0. The main reason for not hardcoding this value is to avoid potential attack risks. The history of this value change can be found in the research report written by MyCrypto. This article organizes all EIPs excluding meta-proposals included in the Ethereum hard fork, see the link for details.

The types of EIPs included in hard forks mainly include billing model changes, introduction of new opcodes, difficulty bombs, economic models, pre-compilation, security considerations, etc. By increasing or decreasing the unit price of opcodes, it balances the mismatch between gas consumption and actual system resource occupation, which can eliminate the hidden danger of the system being attacked by DOS, or facilitate the deployment of specific types of applications.

Some DOS hidden dangers are caused by the misestimation of system resources, and EIP and EIP solve this problem; while other DOS hidden dangers are inherent characteristics of the system, along with the growth of state data, access to the actual resources of state data The consumption also grows, so the unit price of the corresponding opcode needs to be adjusted periodically, a typical example is EIP one of the best written EIPs in my opinion.

Difficulty bomb A total of 6 EIPs are delaying the difficulty bomb, accounting for There are 2 hard forks accompanied by adjustments to the economic model, namely lowering new block rewards. There were 3 forks that were implemented just to delay the difficulty bomb, the hard forks with Glacier in the name.

For the history of the difficulty bomb, see the report in the primitive. Posted by ethereum. Client teams are upgrading the protocol to scale to meet global demand while improving security and decentralization. Today, as highlighted in our Q1 roadmap , ethereum. The terms Eth1 and Eth2 Ethereum 2. Ethereum always had, as part of its roadmap, plans to scale the network in a decentralized way and to transition to proof-of-stake.

As part of that roadmap, the existing proof-of-work chain Eth1 would eventually be deprecated via the difficulty bomb. What changed? As work began on the Beacon Chain , it became clear that the phased Ethereum 2. This led to a revival of research initiatives on the proof-of-work chain such as Stateless Ethereum, a paradigm that would remove the untouched state from the network to bound its growth rate.

The increased focus on making the proof-of-work chain long-term sustainable paired with the realization that the Beacon Chain would be ready much earlier than other components of the Ethereum 2. Not only would this expedite the move to proof-of-stake, but it would also make for a much smoother transition for applications, as the move to proof-of-stake could happen without any migration on their end. This would massively reduce the development work required to deliver a post-merge system and leverage existing clients, which had been battle-tested for years on Mainnet.

Around the same time, research on rollups as a viable and secure way to scale Ethereum proved promising.