Production reduction of Ethereum in Constantinople
do you remember what the consensus mechanism of bitcoin is? The consensus mechanism of bitcoin is pow. To put it simply, the more work you do, the higher the amount of computation you pay, the more likely you will be the first to find the correct hash value, and the more likely you will be rewarded with bitcoin
however, there are some defects in the pow of bitcoin, that is, it is too slow to process transactions, and miners need to constantly collide hash values through calculation, which is costly and inefficient. Friends who are interested in blockchain knowledge should see such a saying:
in order to make up for the deficiency of bitcoin, Ethereum has proposed a new consensus mechanism, called POS (this is the abbreviation of English, which means "proof of equity", also translated into "proof of equity")
POS simply means the same as its literal meaning: equity, equity. The more currency you hold, the more equity you have, the higher your equity
Ethereum's POS means that the more money you hold, the longer you hold it, the less difficult it will be to calculate and the easier it will be to mine
in the initial setting of Ethereum, Ethereum hopes to build a relatively stable system by using POW in the early stage, then graally adopt POW + POS, and finally completely transition to POS. So, it's true that the consensus mechanism of Ethereum is POS, but POS is only a plan or goal at the beginning of Ethereum's release. At present, Ethereum has not yet transitioned to POS, and the consensus mechanism adopted by Ethereum is still pow, that is, the pow of bitcoin, but it is slightly different from the pow of bitcoin
the amount of information here is a bit large,
the first information point is that the consensus mechanism currently adopted by Ethereum is also pow, but it is slightly different from the pow of bitcoin. So, what's the difference between the pow of Ethereum and bitcoin: in short, the mining difficulty of Ethereum can be adjusted, but the mining difficulty of bitcoin can't be adjusted. Just like our college entrance examination, because the teaching situation and the number of students in different provinces are not the same, so the college entrance examination is divided into national papers and provincial independent proposition
Ethereum said that I am in favor of the topic by region. Bitcoin said: No, it must be the same volume in the whole country. The difficulty is the same for everyone
the popular explanation is that bitcoin uses computer computing power to do a lot of hash collisions, enumerate various possibilities to find a correct hash value. The Ethereum system has a special formula to calculate the difficulty of each block. If a block is verified faster than the previous block, Ethereum protocol will increase the difficulty of the block. By adjusting the block difficulty, the time needed to verify the block can be adjusted
according to the Ethereum protocol, the dynamic adjustment method of difficulty is to make the time interval of creating new blocks in the whole network 15 seconds, and the network uses 15 seconds to create blockchain. In this way, because the time is too fast, the synchronization of the system is greatly improved, and it is difficult for malicious participants to launch 51% (that is, more than half) of the computing power to modify historical data in such a short time
the second information point is: in the initial setting of Ethereum, we hope to achieve the transition from POW to
POS through phased upgrade
dating back to 2014, at the beginning of Ethereum's launch, the team announced that the launch of the project would be divided into four stages, namely, Froniter, homestead, metropolis and serenity. In the first three stages, the consensus mechanism adopts pow (workload proof mechanism), and in the fourth stage, it switches to POS (equity proof mechanism)
on July 30, 2015, the first phase "frontier" of Ethereum was officially released. This phase is only suitable for developers. Developers can write smart contracts and decentralized application DAPP on Ethereum network, and miners begin to enter Ethereum network to maintain network security and get Ethereum coins. The leading-edge version is similar to the beta version, proving whether the Ethereum network is reliable or not
on March 14, 2016, Ethereum entered the second stage of "homeland". In this stage, Ethereum provides the wallet function, so that ordinary users can easily experience and use Ethereum. There is no obvious technology improvement in other aspects, but it shows that Ethereum network can run smoothly
in September 2017, Ethereum has reached the third stage of "metropolis"“ "Metropolis" is composed of Byzantine and Constantinople. The goal of this stage is to introce the hybrid chain mode of POW and POS, so as to prepare for the smooth transition from POW to POS. This is the latest popular "Ethereum Constantinople upgrade". In the Constantinople upgrade, Ethereum will make some changes to the underlying protocols and algorithms to lay a good foundation for the implementation of POW and
POS
how much reward will Ethereum get for mining? Miners who win the block creation competition will get the following income:
1. Static reward, 5 ethereums
2. The fuel cost in the block, i.e. gas, we talked about in the last issue
3. As a part of the block, it includes the extra reward of "Uncle block". Uncle is uncle of uncle, and each uncle block can get 1 / 32 of the mining reward as a reward, that is, 5 times 1 / 32, which is equal to 0.15625 ethereums. Here, let's briefly explain the concept of "TERT block". The concept of "TERT block" was proposed by Ethereum. Why should we introce the concept of TERT block? This also starts with bitcoin. In the bitcoin protocol, the longest chain is considered absolutely correct. If a block is not part of the longest chain, it is called a "orphan block". An isolated block is a block, which is also legal, but it may be found later, or the network transmission is slower, and it does not become part of the longest chain. In bitcoin, the solitude is meaningless and will be discarded later, and the miners who find the solitude will not receive mining related rewards
however, Ethereum does not think that isolated blocks are worthless, and Ethereum system will give rewards to miners who find isolated blocks. In Ethereum, isolated blocks are called "Uncle blocks", which can contribute to the security of the main chain. Ethereum's ten second block interval is too fast, which will rece the security. By encouraging the use of tertiary blocks, the main chain can obtain more security guarantees (because the isolated block itself is legal). Moreover, paying the tertiary block can also stimulate the miners to actively mine and actively use tertiary blocks. Therefore, Ethereum thinks that it is valuable.
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 July 30, 2015, v-god and Ethereum Foundation created the first smart contract platform and designed the Dao Ethereum contracton 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
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
The
Ethereum mining
Berlin hard fork will mark the end of the metropolitan era. This is a key stage in Ethereum's history, which is divided into two stages (Byzantine and Constantinople), including several branches, including Atlantis, Istanbul, and finally reached its peak in Berlin