It's Forktober already?
There has been a lot of drama surrounding Bitcoin this year leading up to the first major Bitcoin Cash hard fork on the 1st August. In this month, the Bitcoin blockchain is getting ready for the Bitcoin Gold fork, which I covered in this article and in November, there is yet another update planned (2x). With all this turmoil happening, one may easily overlook that there are exciting news coming up for the second most popular cryptocurrency - the Ethereum Metropolis update .
Fall 2017 marks the third of four planned stages in the Ethereum blockchain development roadmap. Part 1 of the Metropolis update is only a few days away, and it goes by the name Byzantium.
But what does the update actually contribute to the blockchain? - Let's have a look {◕ ◡ ◕}
Features - Sharks and Snarks
Here is a breakdown of the new features in this update:
- zk-SNARKS The most important feature with the longest name is of cryptographic nature: Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. Lovely. Just rolls of the tongue, doesn't it? It is based on a zero-knowledge-proof model , which states that for two parties, one being a prover and the other a verifier, the prover can prove to the verifier that they possess a certain knowledge without telling them what that knowledge actually is.
- Smart Contracts The update will see better handling of faulty smart contracts code. In the new implementation payments will fail if there are mistakes in the programming. They will now also be secure against so called "re-entrancy attacks", which stands for external untrusted code manipulation. Furthermore, Ethereum Smart Contracts are getting a lifecycle update in the Byzantium implementaion. Overall this increases the robustness and security of the Ethereum blockchain.
- Clients A new feature embeds transactions in so calles data receipts which makes it easier for light clients to check for successful transactions, without actually executing the transaction.
- Bring Your Own Bombs The difficulty bomb, a concept designed to increase mining difficulty over time across the network, will be delayed in this implementation to make sure that the transaction times stay within boundaries. Currently they are around 25 seconds, which quite high by the Ethereum 10-second standard. (>‘o’)> Look the stats up live here.
- Mining As Ethereum progresses on the Casper consensus algorithm and moves along the roadmap to switching to a completely PoS blockchain, in the Byzantium update we will see a switch to a hybrid model. In practice, this means that every 100th transaction will now be proof-of -stake (virtually mined). The implementaion of PoS brings many advantages to the blockchain such as: lowering the energy and monetary cost, increasing protection against 51% attacks and increasing the scalability. From the perspective of a miner, the rewards will be decreased. In the long-term, this means we are getting a faster and cheaper blockchain. Byzantium also fixes an error in difficulty adjustment, which makes sure that the block time will be more stable in the future.
To keep it simple: zk-SNARKS is one implementation of this paradigm and the cryptographic engine used by Zcash, which will now be integrated into Ethereum. This enhances the anonymity of the Ethereum blockchain and enables direct order and trade executions between Ethereum and Zcash blockchains. Hell yeah!
So when's the party?
The Metropolis hard fork is divided into two separate core releases named: Byzantium and Constantinople. We are currently about to witness the first part of the fork. The Ethereum team have spent their September running extesive test sets in order to ensure a smooth transition. It was initially uncertain how long the testing will take and so the Byzantium release was scheduled for a timeframe between the late September and the end of October.
If all goes as planned, we can assume that Byzantium will go live on the 17th October 2017. Codetract released a nice ticker where you can follow the update live.
What does this mean for me?
Unlike the bitcoin hard forks that traditionally generate a lot of media traction and emotional debates, the Ethereum forks are discussed less widely due to their humble nature. Indeed, this hard fork is exactly what the name suggest - just an update. It will happen silently and transition unnoticably to regular ETH users.
I you hold ether tokens - kick back and relax: Your tokens are getting more secure and the blockchain more robust against potential threats and malfunctioning contracts. With the implementation of zk-SNARKS, Byzantium is bringing Ethereum to a whole new level of privacy and anonymity. The new ease of executing trades with Zcash is an extra perk. You can look forward to a faster network with lower fees.
Image sources:
https://unsplash.com/photos/zU-_CGMvGp0
Information sources:
https://icowatchlist.com/blog/ethereum-metropolis-update-means-eth-holder/
https://www.coindesk.com/metropolis-today-shifting-plans-ethereums-next-big-upgrade/
https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-metropolis-upgrade-still-months-away/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/update-on-ethereum-metropolis-from-core-dev-meeting/
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/ethereum-metropolis/
- Nick ( @cryptonik ) -
