Fragmentation of Ethereum

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

the 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

before 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"

1. about the variability of blockchain

2. eth, if most people agree to modify the chain, that is, variability, then they can modify the blockchain records and contracts

3. etc, blockchain records and contracts can't be modified, that is, they can't be tampered with

4. here are the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods

   The advantage of

5. variability is that people can make timely changes to make the right decisions. Therefore, modifying the specification is more practical than finding loopholes

6. non modifiability means that no matter how smart people are at that time, it is impossible not to make mistakes. Therefore, when problems arise in this scheme, it is best to find and solve the loopholes through the existing legal framework

7. differences in development

8. eth, whether it is intentionally arranged or since its birth, the core decisions of blockchain are made by Ethereum foundation with the participation of the community and most of them are developed by it

9. etc, the decision-making of blockchain is mainly decided by the feedback of three loose, collaborative teams with community participation

10. in any case, anyone can put forward improvement suggestions for the two kinds of blockchains. This is the benefit of open source, and it is also very common. You will find that developers of the two chains communicate with each other through GitHub and reddit. I hope to improve the frequency of communication in order to achieve the common goal

11. about compatibility

12. at present, the two kinds of blockchains are compatible with each other. Contracts or applications written by eth can be applied on etc, and vice versa

13. eth, focusing on ewasm, is committed to providing a platform for more and more developers, while the issue of contract security is secondary, such as viper

14. etc focuses on making developers create more secure contracts, such as viper, iohk research, at the cost of consuming the number of potential developers

15. it's obvious that both chains can accept each other, regardless of whether their wishes are the same or not. My view is that the number of developers is not necessarily related to the quality of the proct

16. about the transaction speed

17. eth, the average is 25 seconds, which will be shortened after upgrading

18. etc, with an average time of 14 seconds, maintained at 10-14 seconds after upgrade, according to ecip-1010 and ecip-1036 protocols

19. about the block capacity

20. eth, with the daily trading volume of eth graally reaching 5 million, the block capacity is graally saturated. This situation is similar to the recent transaction cost of bitcoin. This problem can be solved by expanding the block capacity by increasing the default fuel limit

21. ETC­， At present, there is still a lot of room for block capacity. As more and more people accept etc, the block capacity will also increase, just like eth

22. about community

23. eth, mainly discuss on reddit

24. etc, mainly discuss on slack

25. about monetary policy

26. eth, the planned supply is growing steadily, resulting in an average inflation of 3% in eth blockchain in its life cycle

27. etc, before 2025, inflation will reach 3%, and then the total supply will reach 200 million etc, and then there will be deflation

    As for the regional distribution of trading volume, China accounts for 20%, South Korea 25% and the United States 25%
    In etc, China accounts for 50%, South Korea 25% and the United States 10%
    About securities, at present, investors do not have the option to trade securities. Recently, one of eth's ETFs, trading open-end index funds, was denied by the regulators

28. etc owns etc trading trust, which allows investors to own etc instead of the asset itself

The idea of Ethereum was born in 2013. Vitalik buterin ˙ When he was a programmer in the bitcoin community, he suggested to the core developers of bitcoin to develop a language for application developers to facilitate the development of various applications. Bitcoin core developers disagree. So God V decided to develop a new platform for this purpose

V God wrote the white paper of etheric currency in 2013, in which he explained the goal of building a decentralized program. In 2014, we got development funds through crowdfunding, so we developed the Ethernet system< (better digital currency trading platform "currency exchange")

since its birth, it has carried out four hard bifurcations so far

for the first time, in order to adjust the difficulty

released a stable version of "homeland" for the second time

for the fourth time, in order to prevent DDoS and rece weight

there is only the third hard fork, because of the hacker attack, and forced to fork. This is the Dao event

on April 30, 2016, the Dao smart contract was officially deployed, and the world's largest crowdfunding was completed, reaching an amazing $150 million As an aside, the biggest crowdfunding event in time is EOS crowdfunding, which has reached an even more amazing $5 billion!)

on June 17, 2016, the Dao was attacked by hackers, who stole about 50 million US dollars of Ethernet currency, and the price also plummeted from US $20 to US $15, causing great harm to Ethereum. In order to recover the loss of investors, the community finally decided to hard fork

therefore, on July 20, 2016, at the block height of 1920000, the hard branching was successful, and the new chain is called Ethereum eth, while the original chain is now Ethereum classic etc

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