Ethereum blockchain network congestion
a brief history of etheric Classics (etc)
etheric classics began with an unfortunate event
in May 2016, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) held a token sale with the goal of establishing a blockchain based venture capital to fund future decentralized applications (dapps) in the ethereum ecosystem
basically, Dao is a complex smart contract that operates in a decentralized way - computer code that automatically performs tasks between multiple parties when conditions are met
despite its ambitious goals and successful token sales, Dao's code has a major vulnerability that allows attackers to steal eth from decentralized organizations
the attacker took advantage of this vulnerability in June 2016, triggering the infamous Dao hacking event, and maliciously stole eth worth about US $50 million
there is no doubt that Dao hacking has shocked Ethereum community and made eth price drop from $20 to $13
after the Dao hacking, the Ethereum community has to choose from three options
< UL >do nothing and try to bear the consequences of the attack
start soft bifurcation to recover funds
deploy a hard fork to recover the lost eth
both soft and hard bifurcations are significant network upgrades. However, soft fork allows users who are not upgraded to communicate with upgraded users, while hard fork is not backward compatible with previous versions
as developers realize that deploying soft forks will expose the network to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, Ethereum community decides to initiate hard forks to recover the funds lost in Dao hacking attacks
although this scheme is supported by most people, a small number of people in Ethereum community oppose it. They think that "code is the law" and blockchain network should be unchangeable
the failure of both sides to reach an agreement on the solution eventually led to the fragmentation of Ethereum blockchain
those who tried to recover the lost eth chose the hard fork and opened the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain as we know it today, while another group stayed on the original Ethereum classic (etc) chain
what problems does ethereal classic solve
Ethernet classic (etc) is a blockchain platform that allows developers to deploy smart contracts and dapps
although this function is the same as Ethereum (ETH), etc blockchain has two main differences
first of all, Ethereum classic community opposes tampering with distributed ledger and supports the view that "blockchain network cannot and should not be modified"
secondly, although there is no rigid upper limit on the total supply of eth, it is allowed to create 230 million etc at most by adopting the monetary policy of constant supply
as a bonus item, ethereal classic launched Atlantis hard bifurcation last year to increase the interaction with Ethereum and improve the privacy protection of transactions through ZK snarks
the trading platforms recommended by ethereal classic etc are: Fire coin, okex, AAX, etc strong>
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"
Blockchain is a new application mode of distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission, consensus mechanism, encryption algorithm and other computer technologies. Blockchain is an important concept of bitcoin. It is essentially a decentralized database. At the same time, as the underlying technology of bitcoin, it is a series of data blocks generated by using cryptographic methods. Each data block contains a batch of information about bitcoin network transactions, Used to verify the validity of its information (anti-counterfeiting) and generate the next block
if such technology wants to be put into application, the biggest problem is the "Impossible Triangle problem"
that is, scalability, decentralization and security cannot be achieved at the same time, and only two of them can be achieved
most of the existing public chain projects in the market are difficult to put into use on a large scale

Ethereum uses fog computing. The data processing and applications of fog computing are concentrated in the devices at the edge of the network, rather than almost all stored in the cloud, which is an extension concept of cloud computing, which is more in line with the spirit of decentralization of blockchain. If all the storage and operations still stay on the centralized server, then it will not be a real blockchain
recently, the hot "ethereal cat" on Ethereum network has led to the congestion of Ethereum network. The problem is that the TPS concurrency per second of Ethereum is too low. The emergence of ethereumfog with fog computing will break the embarrassing situation of Ethereum network congestion, and add powerful decentralized storage and additional computing power to the chain
the concept of fog computing may be unfamiliar to many chain friends, but it is the most important aspect of ether fog to attract investors. In fact, I have heard about the concept of fog computing for a long time, and I have always thought that fog computing is the future development direction. When it comes to fog computing, we should start with cloud computing. In fact, the cloud computing we see now evolves from the cluster of independent servers, that is, from the original centralized independent servers to large server clusters, but in the final analysis, it is still a form of centralized computing. Compared with cloud computing, which is the evolution of centralized computing, fog computing is to share computing tasks with various computing power devices around us, and realize the evolution of decentralized and distributed computing, which coincides with the philosophy of blockchain itself.
1. Asia and the Middle East will actively promote blockchain
2. Network security requirements will drive the popularization of blockchain
3 - all instries will fully invest in blockchain application technology
4 - automation and privatization are coming.
