When will Ethereum slice technology be applied
just like bitcoin, Ethereum is neither controlled nor owned by anyone - it is an open source project created by many people around the world. Different from bitcoin protocol, Ethereum's design is very flexible and adaptable. It is very easy to create new applications on the Ethereum platform. With the release of homestead, anyone can use the applications on this platform safely
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain. It does not give users a series of preset operations, but allows users to create complex operations according to their own wishes. In this way, it can be used as a platform for many types of decentralized blockchain applications
in a narrow sense, Ethereum refers to a series of protocols that define a decentralized application platform. The core of Ethereum is Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), which can encode any complex algorithm. In computer science terminology, Ethereum is "Turing complete.". Developers can use the existing JavaScript and python as the model of other friendly programming languages to create applications running on the Ethereum simulator.
There is an essential difference between Ethereum and bitcoin. What is the difference? Bitcoin defines a set of currency system, while Ethereum focuses on building a main chain (which can be understood as a road) to allow a large number of blockchain applications to run on this road
from this point of view, Ethereum's application scenarios are more extensive, which is why we say that Ethereum marks a simple monetary system in the era of blockchain
1.0, and a transformation to other instries and application scenarios in the era of blockchain 2.0
however, there is no perfect thing in the world. Although Ethereum has expanded the application scope of blockchain in all walks of life and improved the speed of transaction processing, it also has some disputes and doubts
first, the solution to the lack of scalability of Ethereum: slicing technology and lightning network
the bottom design of Ethereum, the biggest problem is that Ethereum has only one chain and no side chain, which means that all programs have to run on this chain equally, consuming resources and causing system congestion. Just like last year's very popular Ethereum game "encryption cat", when this game was very popular, it once caused Ethereum network paralysis
to improve the processing capacity, Ethereum proposes two ways: shard and lightning network. Let's introce these two technologies respectively
(1) fragmentation technology
vitalik buterin, founder of Ethereum, believes that the reason why mainstream blockchain networks such as bitcoin process transactions very slowly is that every miner has to process every transaction in the whole network, which is actually very inefficient. The idea of fragmentation technology is: a transaction does not need to be processed by all nodes in the whole network, as long as some nodes (miners) in the network are allowed to process it. Therefore, Ethereum network is divided into many pieces. At the same time, each piece can handle different transactions. In this way, the network performance will be greatly improved
however, the slicing technology is also controversial. As we all know, the important idea of blockchain technology is decentralization. Only when the whole network witnesses (processes) the same transaction can it have the highest authority. The Ethereum slicing technology is similar to the group witness, not all nodes witness together. In this way, it will lose the absolute "decentralization" attribute, and can only achieve the purpose of high performance by sacrificing certain characteristics of decentralization
(2) lightning network
lightning network uses the way of transaction under the chain. What does that mean? It means: when the participants of lightning network transfer money to each other, they do not need to confirm the transaction through the main chain of Ethereum, but create a payment channel between the participants and complete it under the chain
however, lightning network is not separated from the main chain. Before establishing a payment channel, you need to use the assets on the main chain as collateral to generate a balance proof, which indicates that you can transfer the corresponding balance. In the case that both parties of the transaction hold the balance certificate, both parties can make unlimited number of transfers under the chain through the payment channel
only when the off chain transaction is completed and the assets need to be transferred back to the chain, the balance change information of the main chain account will be registered on the Ethereum main chain, and no matter how many transactions occur ring this period, there will be no record on the main chain
another real benefit of lightning network is that it can save the cost of miners for you. At present, when we trade on the main chain of Ethereum, we need to consume gas and pay for miners. Once we move the transaction to the lower chain, we can save this part of the cost
Of course, lightning network is not perfect. When using the lightning network, the assets on the main chain should be used as collateral; And this part of assets as collateral can not be used before the user completes the transaction under the chain. This also determines that lightning trading is only suitable for small transactionsthe above is the problem of insufficient scalability of Ethereum, as well as the two main solutions: fragmentation technology and lightning network
Second, there are loopholes in Ethereum's smart contract and the infamous Dao event
Ethereum's smart contract is very powerful, but there are loopholes in any code. The biggest controversy of Ethereum's smart contract lies in the so-called loopholes, that is, security issues. According to relevant research, 34200 (about 3%) of the nearly 1 million smart contracts based on Ethereum contain security vulnerabilities, which will allow hackers to steal eth, freeze assets or delete contracts, such as the infamous Dao incident
(1) what does Dao meanbefore introcing the Dao event, let's first introce what Dao is. Dao is the abbreviation of decentralized
autonomous organization, which can be understood as decentralized autonomous organization. From the perspective of Ethereum, Dao is a kind of contract or a combination of contracts on the blockchain, which is used to replace the government's review and complex intermediate proceres, so as to achieve an efficient and decentralized trust system. Therefore, Dao is not a specific organization, that is to say, there can be many Dao, all kinds of Dao
(2) the infamous Dao event
however, when we talk about Dao now, we basically refer to the Dao event, that is, the infamous hacker attack event we just mentioned. As we know, the English word "the" refers to "the Dao event". The Dao event
refers to "the Dao event", because we just said that Dao is not a specific organization, there can be many Dao, all kinds of Dao
in 2016, slock.it, a German company focusing on "smart locks", launched the Dao project on Ethereum in order to realize decentralized physical exchange (such as apartments and ships). Since April 30, 2016, the financing window has been open for 28 days
unexpectedly, this Dao project is very popular. It raised more than US $100 million in just half a month. By the end of the whole financing period, it raised a total of US $150 million. Therefore, it has become the largest crowdfunding project in history. However, it didn't last long. In June, hackers took advantage of the loopholes in the smart contract to successfully transfer more than 3.6 million Ethernet coins and put them into a Dao sub organization, which has the same structure as the Dao. At that time, the price of Ethernet currency fell directly from more than $20 to less than $13
this event shows that there are loopholes in smart contracts, and once the loopholes are exploited by hackers, the consequences will be very serious. This is why many people criticize Ethereum and say that its smart contract is not smart
to solve this problem, many foreign companies begin to provide code audit services in order to solve the vulnerability problem of smart contract. From a technical point of view, some teams are currently testing smart contracts. Most of these teams are led by professors from Harvard, Stanford and Yale, and some of them have obtained investment from leading institutions
in addition to the problems of insufficient expansibility and loopholes in smart contracts, the controversy over Ethereum lies in the POS consensus mechanism it pursues, that is, the proof of equity mechanism. Under the proof of equity mechanism, if anyone holds more money and holds it for a longer time, he will get more "rights" (interests) and have the opportunity to get bookkeeping power, Bookkeeping can also be rewarded. In this way, it is easy to create the oligarchic advantage of "the stronger the stronger"
Another problem is the chaos of ICO. ICO is a common way to raise funds for blockchain projects, which we can understand as pre-sale. The outbreak of ICO projects on Ethereum has caused illegal activities such as fund allocation and money fraud under the banner of ICO, which has caused security risks to social and financial stabilitywhat is Ethereum:
Ethereum is an innovation based on the application of technologies and concepts in bitcoin to computers. Ethereum itself imitates a lot of bitcoin technology to maintain the computer platform. Blockchain technology is one of them
Ethereum platform can safely run any program users want
advantages of Ethereum over other competitive currencies before Ethereum appeared, some digital currencies imitated bitcoin. However, these projects have their own shortcomings, they can only support one or several specific applications at the same time< However, the reason why Ethereum can surpass the limitations of these projects in the past is because of the core idea of Ethereum
what Ethereum wants to implement is a blockchain protocol with built-in programming language. Since it supports programming language, in theory, any blockchain application can be defined with this language, and then run on Ethereum's blockchain protocol as an application
The design of Ethereum is very flexible and adaptable
Ethereum target sets the advantages of blockchain technology, in order to add the advantages of blockchain, such as decentralization, openness and security, to almost all computing fields
blockchain applications of Ethereum
Ethereum has many blockchain applications, such as digital applications of gold and stocks, financial derivatives applications, DNS and digital authentication, etc
Ethereum has achieved more than 100 blockchain applications by many start-ups
Ethereum has also been closely watched by some financial institutions, banking consortia (such as R3), as well as large companies like Samsung, Deloitte, RWE and IBM. As a result, a number of blockchain applications such as simplified and automated financial transactions, merchant loyalty index tracking, and gift cards designed to achieve decentralization of electronic transactions have emerged
the relationship between Ethereum and blockchain:
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain
Ethereum does not give users a series of preset operations (such as bitcoin transaction), but allows users to create complex operations according to their own wishes
in this way, Ethereum can be used as a platform for various types of decentralized blockchain applications, including but not limited to cryptocurrency
like other blockchains, Ethereum also has a peer-to-peer network protocol. Ethereum blockchain database is maintained and updated by many nodes connected to the network. Each network node runs the Ethereum simulator and executes the same instructions. Therefore, people sometimes call Ethereum "world computer"
Ethereum is the next generation of cryptography ledger. It intends to support many advanced functions, including user issuing currency, intelligent protocol, decentralized transaction and what we think is the first fully decentralized autonomous organization (Daos) or decentralized autonomous company (DACS) application
Ethereum does not specifically support every single type of function as a feature. On the contrary, Ethereum includes a built-in Turing complete scripting language, which allows you to write code for the feature you want to implement through a mechanism called "contract". A contract is like an automatic agent. Every time a transaction is received, the contract will run a specific code, which can modify the data storage inside the contract or send the transaction. Advanced contracts can even modify their own code
Ethereum was launched on November 1, 2015, and launched on August 22, 2016 on bitcoin trading platform, a well-known domestic trading platform; 30-¥ About 60, current: ￥ 1259.97, the rise is amazing
in front of the article: the video version is slightly different from the text version. If you want to see my affectionate interpretation, please see the video version (meow understands blockchain phase 22 | sharding: Ethereum is too slow, "disk" him!), The logic of thinking is strange. Please see the extended version
recently, Ethereum has shown an overwhelming positive trend e to the Constantinople upgrade, while Ethereum's upgrade road is like upgrading and fighting monsters, falling into rabbithole. No one knows how deep the hole is. Since it is a long way to go, it is of vital importance to make every step well and accurately. After overcoming this difficulty, Ethereum's next technical difficulty, sharding fragmentation, has been put on the table again. This issue of "meow understands blockchain" will take you into sharding, the magic weapon that makes Ethereum fast
what is sharding
slicing technology is not a new concept. At first, it is an optimization scheme for large central database. Specifically, it divides the data in large database into many shards according to certain rules, and then stores these data in different servers to rece the data access pressure of each server, So as to improve the performance of the whole database system
let's take a small popular example:
for example, meituan, Didi taxi and other software that we often use can be divided according to the "city". Because the data of different cities do not need to communicate, the data of different cities can be stored in different databases, so that the database server can be deployed to the nearest node from the corresponding city, Can also improve the speed of access, why not do it
from the above example, we should have a preliminary understanding of the concept of fragmentation. What about fragmentation in blockchain scenarios
taking Ethereum fragmentation as an example, in the original single chain system, the overall performance of the public chain depends on the performance of a single node. After fragmentation, each node only needs to undertake the work of the whole network, and each fragmentation works in parallel. According to vitalik, each shard is like a separate galaxy, and each fragmentation is like an independent universe, In this way, the efficiency will be improved naturally! Originally, the total network TPS of Ethereum chain was about 20. Now, if it is increased to 100 pieces, the total network TPS can be increased to 2000. Similarly, the total network capacity will be increased to 100 times of the original
"each node only needs to undertake part of the work of the whole network", which will lead to several major problems. 1. How to determine which piece of work this node is responsible for? 2. Which transactions should be classified into which segments? 3. Does each node only need to store its own transaction information (ledger)
according to the implementation of the above problems, we can divide the fragmentation into three types: network fragmentation, transaction fragmentation and state fragmentation
Network fragmentation: how to divide the nodes of the whole network into different partitions
transaction segmentation: how to divide the whole network transactions into different segments
State fragmentation: how to make each node only maintain the account book in its own fragmentation without affecting the security of the whole system
the difference and connection between main chain and fragmentation chain
we have understood the types of fragmentation, so what's the difference between main chain and shard chain
turn left | turn right
the realization of Ethereum fragmentation is a long process. Even vitalik himself said that it will be graally realized by stages. We'd better look forward to whether fragmentation can move from theory to practice
in front of the article: the video version is slightly different from the text version. If you want to see my affectionate interpretation, please see the video version (meow understands blockchain phase 22 | sharding: Ethereum is too slow, "disk" him!), The logic of thinking is strange. Please see the extended version
recently, Ethereum has shown an overwhelming positive trend e to the Constantinople upgrade, while Ethereum's upgrade road is like upgrading and fighting monsters, falling into rabbithole. No one knows how deep the hole is. Since it is a long way to go, it is of vital importance to make every step well and accurately. After overcoming this difficulty, Ethereum's next technical difficulty, sharding fragmentation, has been put on the table again. This issue of "meow understands blockchain" will take you into sharding, the magic weapon that makes Ethereum fast
what is sharding
slicing technology is not a new concept. At first, it is an optimization scheme for large central database. Specifically, it divides the data in large database into many shards according to certain rules, and then stores these data in different servers to rece the data access pressure of each server, So as to improve the performance of the whole database system
let's take a small popular example:
for example, meituan, Didi taxi and other software that we often use can be divided according to the "city". Because the data of different cities do not need to communicate, the data of different cities can be stored in different databases, so that the database server can be deployed to the nearest node from the corresponding city, Can also improve the speed of access, why not do it
from the above examples, we should have a preliminary understanding of the concept of fragmentation. What about fragmentation in blockchain scenarios
taking Ethereum fragmentation as an example, in the original single chain system, the overall performance of the public chain depends on the performance of a single node. After fragmentation, each node only needs to undertake the work of the whole network, and each fragmentation works in parallel. According to vitalik, each shard is like a separate galaxy, and each fragmentation is like an independent universe, In this way, the efficiency will be improved naturally! Originally, the total network TPS of Ethereum chain was about 20. Now, if it is increased to 100 pieces, the total network TPS can be increased to 2000. Similarly, the total network capacity will be increased to 100 times of the original
"each node only needs to undertake part of the work of the whole network", which will lead to several major problems. 1. How to determine which piece of work this node is responsible for? 2. Which transactions should be classified into which segments? 3. Does each node only need to store its own transaction information (ledger)
according to the implementation of the above problems, we can divide the fragmentation into three types: network fragmentation, transaction fragmentation and state fragmentation
Network fragmentation: how to divide the nodes of the whole network into different partitions
transaction segmentation: how to divide the whole network transactions into different segments
State fragmentation: how to make each node only maintain the account book in its own fragmentation without affecting the security of the whole system
the difference and connection between main chain and fragmentation chain
we have understood the types of fragmentation, so what's the difference between main chain and shard chain
turn left | turn right
the realization of Ethereum fragmentation is a long process. Even vitalik himself said that it will be graally realized by stages. We'd better look forward to whether fragmentation can move from theory to practice