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by TomVDB 1947 days ago
I remember that argument being made 2 years ago during the last mining craze.

Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems like it’s just a carrot to deflect criticism about power consumption, but not something that will actually happen.
1 comments
DennisP 1947 days ago
It's already running with $5 billion in ETH deposited. It'll take some more time before migrating the legacy chain, but the really hard part is live. There was nothing like that two years ago.
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ppf 1947 days ago
You mean "the really easy part"? The Beacon Chain doesn't do much at all. Last time I checked, they hadn't even got a design for how contract code would be executed in Eth 2.0.
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DennisP 1947 days ago
Yes, consensus is the hard part. That was a massive research effort, with a lot of game theory and recently-invented cryptography.

Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before.

There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of multiple options, rather than figuring out how to do it at all. As I mentioned in another comment, someone built a running proof-of-concept in about a day.

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ppf 1946 days ago
Consensus is not the hard part. By "game theory", you mean "agree with everyone else, or we'll take your Eth away".

The hard part is figuring out how to execute arbitrary code and synchronize it across all shards, without removing the benefits of having shards in the first place.

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DennisP 1946 days ago
Shard execution isn't necessary for migrating to proof-of-stake. The PoS migration just links a single EVM to the beacon chain; that's enough to remove PoW, i.e. the main concern in this discussion about GPUs.

Around the same time is the migration to data sharding, which multiplies data storage by 23X initially. That's without code execution on the shards.

Zkrollups in production now do the execution off-chain. On chain, you store compressed state data and a compact proof that everything executed correctly. That's good for a couple thousand tx/sec today, and 23X that after data sharding. Given that, Vitalik has argued that shard execution may not even be necessary; it wouldn't add nearly so much transaction capacity as we'd have already.

Here are the papers on how Ethereum consensus actually works:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437

https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052

And here's more detail on rollups:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

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