Title: Ethereum_2_0_Roadmap_session
Category: Protocol_Calls___happenings

Author: mariapaulafn
Date: 2018-10-28T11:28:38.714Z

Details here --> https://hackmd.io/Lagu29aMSaKRVT6BeodMKg
We would really appreciate if you could post your notes in this thread.

Author: 5chdn
Date: 2018-10-28T13:23:49.533Z

Thanks Maria! Thanks!

Author: boris
Date: 2018-10-31T01:31:35.989Z

I believe @mariapaulafn is going to turn this into a nicely formatted Medium post, too, but I want to make sure that we have notes “on platform” here, so pasting in from HackMD.

ETH2 Github Repos

https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs

https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-pm – equivalent to AllCoreDevs, this is where meetings and calls and notes are handled in issues
https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-tests

Afri:

estimated timeline?

Danny:

lot of client teams here working on it

Paul G

Sigma Prime – building ETH2 client called Lighthouse
first mistake – getting up and giving a timeline for a sw project! (laughter)
very difficult to plan
March next year (2019)
multiple teams working in a decentralized manner

Lane:

what is the biggest thing that could take longer?

Paul G / Sigma Prime

can’t think of an unknown – if we come across a problem with the spec

Lane:

what is Parity’s perspective

Afri:

we are excited – have a proof of concept
built on top of Parity Substrate
we are even more far away than other teams, because we joined later
parity is a bit more conservative implementing new specs

Afri:

cross client test net
need a new test net that isn’t proof of work

Jaciek / Nimbus Status Client:

ETH2 is not just the beacon chain
execution, working out sharding, a whole different world
two specs merged – I see March as a PoC, validate some assumptions
Give out to community to start tearing apart

Danny:

targeting first half of next year, is going to pressure us to get the spec in line
serialization formats, wire formats – some things that are outside of the spec

Jaciek:

a push gives a target to work against
give rest of community something to play around with

Lane:

in Council of Berlin
lots of questions about core, roadmap
what is the roadmap? does anyone control it? how is it maintained?
everyone up here is core?

Vitalik

public HackMD file
recently moved to Github as of Sept 20

LANE: What is the Ethereum roadmap?
Danny:

ever evolving as needed
any one version can say what it is

Vitalik:

first documents – Ethereum Whitepaper
then around March 2015 Vinay Gupta, blog post – Ethereum Launch Process
Frontier Homestead Metropolis Serenity
Switch to PoS in Serenity
Implemented 5/8ths of that vision
After Homestead delayed by DAO
Metropolis split into Byzantine, new things of pre-compliles, then Constantinople, and possibly other small hard forks
and then Serenity – move to Proof of Stake
this was something floated as an idea, since the beginning
ideas around sharding developed and tacked on over time
I feel like there always has been this impression – keep on upgrading and improving the protocol
getting PoS finished
scalability through sharding and other improvements
before 2017 much less clear, then CasparFFG
hybrid PoS, sad to see it go because I wrote it
realized it make more sense that PoS and sharding with beacon chain would make more proof of stake
where do they live? Between blog posts, EthResearch, end of last year, home for research discussions, that’s where a lot of the protocol discussions happen
some point was a spec in HackMD, that was moved to Github, when we’re past editing it every week
at this point, proposed changes, will live in issues and PR in the repo
replacing withdrawal time period with withdrawal rate max
github issue and EthResearch thread
most abstractly – goes back several years
EthResearch defacto home for that – changes to CasperFFG, proof of custody, cross shard transactions
Eth2 is fine grained

Afri:

what is the timeline for eWASM?

Vitalik:

soon?
eWASM will be the VM for the shard chains

Vitalik:

retire the VM
important to reduce complexity

Jamie: What is the currency of ETH2

how is that considered by the community?

Vitalik:

make deposits on beacon chain withdraw to shard
ether on PoW chain to shard chains
intention to
don’t feel like anyone has fully decided

Paul:

same ETH as current chain
agree with moving it on to shards

Jaciek

when applications move over
affects which eth is eth – where value in ETH2 comes over
that’s up to each application to decide when to move

Paul:

you never have to move
majority might

Bryant:

tools, have a solid toolset for EVM
eWASM has new opportunities around LLVM
not clear to me how we can be ready to go with the tooling ready to go

Vitalik:

eWASM as a backend for Solidity
Vyper

Greg:

eWASM and EVM is like an argument
community seems to be conflict averse
at universities and for profit companies – technical arguments can become very conflictual
and then you go to the bar together
professors hiring people so they can have someone to argue with
the aversion to conflict causes more conflict
from early on we’ve had an EVM to eWASM tool, that you can compile VM to
as Bryant says, we have a toolset that is growing
the longer it takes to get ETH2, the more EVM code is out there
and if people ask me, how do you write high value contracts – and we have contracts with $Ms of dollars in value
I would first write a formal specification, and then write the program in assembly, and then prove that the assembly implements the specifications
and leave high level compilation out of it – trust as many tools as possible
can do the same thing with eWASM, once it exists
we don’t know how long that will be
if we try and deprecate EVM1, we are going to create a lot of complexity for people who are using it to get work done
well, we’re writing in Solidity so they have to recompile – because lots of people hired people, and now their contracts just work – no desire, no money, to hire somebody to port their contracts
we’ve put them in a position

Bryant:

creates a barrier to entry to ETH2
on top of learning sharding, the new beacon chain

Greg:

doesn’t mean eWASM shouldn’t be the base of things
can’t just abandon what we have
have to keep evolving what we have
talking to other development teams – yeah, we’re working with EVM1, has some problems, wouldn’t be hard to fix

@Ethernian:

account abstraction?

Bryant:

time to restructure data structures – different asset trees?

Vitalik:

abstract nonces vs abstracting signatures vs. (something)
This concept has been discovered but not totally thought through yet.rough y
(some text missed)


Danny:

earlier there was the sentiment of not doing work on EVM
I think that we do have time to coordinate on forks on the next 2 years
that’s Danny’s opinion
think that good idea that EVM is functional and improved

Greg:

EIP615 and others implemented on Aleph CPP

Lane:

is there more than one Ethereum roadmap?

Danny:

parallel

Greg:

From the beginning I’ve said there is nothing technically keeping us from making EVM1 run at any speed
From what I hear, the problem is that we don’t have the technical competence to do so. But we have a very large community and a lot of money
I don’t have a problem with eWASM but I don’t think it’s necessary. But if that’s where the group, sobeit

– missing notes –
Greg
Casey

parallel between eWASM and EVM
why can’t we just improve EVM?
easier to just switch to eWASM because so much tooling available
(Bryant: not for smart contract use case)
ideally main chain just upgrades and its cheaper gas price for everyone – but that’s possible in theory
EVM was developed for the usecase of smart contracts (solidity, serpent), but not for the use case of computing complex cryptographic functions
I disagree with Greg on that EVM is proper place to improve for this use-case. It seems like this is the much harder path than to go with EWASM

Greg

I could see an idea of having parallel compilers, one that is more economical (slower) and one that is much faster. But in the current spec, EWASM needs to be validated on the EVM

(missed some notes)
Ethernian (here is the question I had, but failed to ask clearly):
“Do you think the governance (especially release workflow) should be part of ETH2 specification? May be as some kind of “release game” ?
IMHO, most security deficits we have, are not in the math or software but in workflow and governance.
As an example I would mention a bitcoin bug fixed hiddenly and nobody have ever noticed that the patch doesn’t match the bug description. It means our assumptions about release audits made by community are not realistic and that means huge security risk.”
Lane

Please, if any of this is going over anyone’s heads, feel free to stand up and let us know.

Boris

E2specs and ethresear.ch are now the primary forums for discussing compiler research and where decisions are being made
What about EIPs?

Danny

In my opinion, we’re a little to early for a formal EIP process
(lots of missing notes)
I would say that there is no theoretical problems on PoS

Vitalik

There’s a lot of little issues, but that’s all
The nice thing about the roadmap is that because it’s in phases, so not everything is dependent on phases, so not everything else
The role randomness plays in roadmap: the way the protocol has been designed does not require secure randomness. Attacker can’t roll back even a single block
Randomness completion is nice but not necessary

Danny

Randomness comes from RanDAO
Contractual method for randomly determining who gets to submit a block
Mechanism for vbalidators to participate on beacon chain, which reveals the randomness for the next “round”
Can say that RanDAO is biasable. We do have people researching to harden and propose strong randomness

Vitalik

Immature blockchains: one guy makes a block, next guy makes a block and chooses another block to build on, another guy makes a block and chooses a block, etc
Problem with PoS is that if you can predict who will be making the blocks ahead of time (e.g. I know in a span of twenty, I’ll make 15)

Marek

Question: Would it make sense to do more evolutionary/iterative approach with lots of small hardforks

Vitalik

That’s kind of it. Start with beacon chain and then other small steps

Danny
(missed comments)
Lane

We definitely need help with Project Management on roadmap. Open call (even if you have less technical skill)

Ryan

Eth2.0 goal is to be live during WWIII

Casey

Is it okay to compromise on that goal? If the world is falling apart, why do we need this?

Etherian

Does this fall into a blanket question of governance? Should we make governance a part of Eth standard? Actually more formal?

Boris

can you clarify?

Etherian

I feel like we don’t have governance as a standard. Think of last Bitcoin hack, there was no governance to find and discover it. Huge security

Boris

More about hardfork?
I’ll redirect, how do you coordinate consensus among clients to determine which forks?

Danny

Right now it’s still pretty early
Research is still primarly EF, but we’re seeing more from Parity, Status, Pegasus, etc.
It’s really more of a coordination problem
I don’t know if we’re moving too fast or two slow.

Vitalik

If all researchers that retire tomorrow, is the research they’ve done satisfactory for Eth2.0?
We’re not there yet, some areas where a little more research is valuable. Even on L1
–question from Etherian-- how do we test PoS in situation there is no actual value at stake?
We could launch a beacon chain with small intervals (only for the data layer) in real time to get technical information.

Question from audience

How do current ERC20 contracts fit and migrate to 2.0?

Vitalik

If you have contract for simple, short-lived interactions, just copy/paste onto EWASM and phase one out
Could be centralized airdrop or script that burns coins on one side and mints them on another side
Non-financial dApps can just move really quickly
Solidity in many cases will compile to eWASM
Could stay on 1.0 chain until it eventually folds into 2.0 chain, in which case it will require some client-side work.
Could make light client for 2.0chain that fits into 1.0 chain
Ultimately, this research is something we’d be interested in giving research grants for.

Author: mariapaulafn
Date: 2018-11-02T18:22:08.955Z

Hi! will be transcribing and working on this over the weekend. I spoke with Danny and he told me he would be happy to review and add stuff if needed 
My raw notes here: Ethereum 2.0 Q&A session - ROUGH NOTES, NOT READY FOR PUBLISHING - HackMD

Author: mariapaulafn
Date: 2018-11-05T17:18:05.480Z

Ordered and decently readable notes on 2.0, already rolled all Boris’ notes and added some stuff from the dialogue transcript, sent to Danny Ryan and to Lane to add more stuff.
And will also share on social media for anyone that wants to add more.


docs.google.com



ETH2.0 Roadmap Session - ETHMagicians
Ethereum 2.0/ Serenity Q&amp;A session at ETHMagicians Participants: Danny Ryan (EF), Vitalik Buterin (EF), Afri Schoedon (Parity), Paul Hauner (Sigma Prime - Lighthouse TODO LINK) , Greg Colvin (ETHMagicians), Jacek Sieka (Status - Nimbus TODO LINK),...

Author: lrettig
Date: 2018-11-27T13:51:39.327Z

@mariapaulafn thanks for putting this together! Great resource. Added a few edits.

Author: mariapaulafn
Date: 2018-11-28T10:02:27.195Z

Thanks Lane! the doc now lives in medium but ill post here too.  https://medium.com/ethereum-magicians/demystifying-the-road-to-ethereum-2-0-8130ade8d00f