devcon 5 / the cbc casper roadmap
Duration: 00:30:36
Speaker: Vlad Zamfir
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Invalid Date
A Modest Proposal for Ethereum 2.0
Vitalik Buterin gives his talk titled, "A Modest Proposal for Ethereum 2.0"
Why Dapp Users will Hate Cross-Shard Communication (and what you can do about it)
ETH2 is approaching, and initial indications are that substantially all dapp experiences will suffer. Some problems may be addressed with significant changes to design and development processes, but several tradeoffs are unavoidable without sacrificing scale, security, or decentralization. For example, essentially all popular dapps rely on the fungibility of Ether in a managed pool (e.g. Uniswap, Augur, Maker). In a sharded ecosystem, Ether is meaningfully non-fungible across shards, and users will bear monetary and management costs as a result.This talk will give an overview of cross-shard communication strategies and discuss their impact on developer and user experience. These include merged consensus, shard relays, consensus introspection, and credit markets. For each mechanism, we'll discuss expected impact on user experience metrics like execution time, transaction outcome, and price slippage.The talk is not all bad news. We've discovered some elegant new approaches that give dapps a variety of communication choices. The last section of the talk will discuss specific communication strategies that are amenable to specifi
Interblockchain Communication & Interchain Topology
The interblockchain community protocol will faciliate permissionless interoperation between smart contracts on Ethereum 1.0/1.x & Ethereum 2.0, Cosmos zones, Polkadot parachains, Bitcoin & more. The first half of this talk presents the protocol construction, notes security properties & consensus requirements, explains the message channel interface exposed to smart contracts & modules, and discusses special techniques for bridging Nakamoto proof-of-work consensus blockchains such as Ethereum 1.0/1.x to chains with finality. The second half embarks on a speculative exploration of what the future topology of interconnected blockchains might look like: what economic constraints might shape cross-chain design choices, what kinds of applications might most benefit from cross-chain logic, and what shared ecosystem standards might most effectively facilitate positive-sum interoperation, with particular attention to integration into the Ethereum 2.0 specification process.
Polkadot's Data Availability and Validity Scheme
How can we make blockchains secure at scale? We suggest a data availabilitty and validity scheme that make sharding efficient in terms of the number of validators and validating resources. We first describe the Polkadot data availability and validity scheme and consider its applicability to other sharded systems (e.g. ETH2.0). In Polkadot we tie an erasure coding data availability scheme with consensus, where we can not finalise an unavailable block. Moreover, reports of unavailability or invalidity trigger extra checks. The aim is that, with high probability, we do not finalise an unavailable or invalid block provided that there are enough honest actors to report. The key advantage of this scheme is that we need fewer validating actors per shard and in turn less total computational and especially networking resources. This softens the trade-off between scalability and security.
Demystifying libp2p gossipsub: a scalable and extensible p2p gossip protocol
ETH2.0 is evaluating libp2p gossipsub as a decentralized, peer-to-peer publish/subscribe mechanism for validators, proposers and attesters to quickly disseminate data throughout the entire network. This talk covers the technical design, tradeoffs and functionality of gossipsub, aiming to deliver foundational knowledge to everyone interested in learning more about this potential building block of the ETH2.0 network. Gossipsub was incubated in the libp2p project as a replacement for the naïve floodsub pubsub router (which simply broadcasts messages to all peers we know are interested in a topic). It maintains stable reciprocal meshes via explicit link grafting, while preserving random gossip to disseminate metadata, and to provide cues to aid message deliverability. It also features a piggybacking algorithm to minimise the overhead of control messages; allows developers to attach custom per-topic validator functions; and more. Come to learn more about how gossipsub works, and to hear about the state of the art of p2p pubsub protocols!
libp2p ecosystem: what’s up and what’s next
The libp2p networking stack is becoming a foundational element in many decentralized systems (including ETH2.0). In this session, we'd like to: walk the audience through the current state of the ecosystem, and the 7+ language implementations.explain the toughest problems the core team and community is currently researching and hacking on, e.g. decentralized NAT traversal, slimming down protocols, censorship and deep packet inspection, DHT scaling, traffic shaping, resource control, etc.present what features, subsystems, protocols and redesigns are coming next in libp2p.call out for help and participation in areas where input, feedback and help from contributors is appreciated.Join us, and let's advance the state of the art of p2p networks together!
Shaky ERC20 Allowances
Sometimes, we can't see the forest for the trees. When not used carefully in dapps, ERC20 token allowances fit that description perfectly. This presentation goes into the story of how I accidentally put over 10,000 DAI at risk for my users, even if they only deposited 100 DAI in the smart contract per se.
Beyond Stake: Implementing Diversity Policies on PoS
We look at the challenges of implementing various diversity-improving policies on a PoS network. Economic (dis)incentivization is a popular approach, but can be undermined by non-standard miner economics such as (cross-domain) MEV or derivatives on incentivization. As an alternative, we outline an approach to include diversity support into the consensus level without requiring changing the basic functionality of the protocol by adapting the concept of general adversary structures.
Nano-payments on Ethereum
Piotr Janiu of Golem (http://golemproject.net/) presents on Nano-payments on the Ethereum blockchain
A Breakdown of Ethereum Supply Distribution Since Genesis
As Ethereum looks ahead to its transition to a fully to a proof-of-stake consensus protocol, the topic of Ethereum’s supply distribution matters more than ever to network stakeholders. This is because under PoS, the amount of ETH users control directly determines how much influence they can have over the network’s consensus building process and the amount of rewards they can earn from staking. This talk dives into how distributed ETH supply on Ethereum has become over the last 7 years.