Ethereum update: Thoughts from the last dev call
Gentlemen, I am thoroughly spooked by what I heard at the last dev call. This will come out as word vomit, I’m sorry for not being a professional writer, but I feel it has to be said even if I am not the most eloquent person to do so.
-Extrapolation leads me to assume that POS is much farther off than I had thought. As the 9th month of 2018 is about to begin, the Constantinople fork is still roughly 3 months away. During the call there was a push for ProgPOW to be included in the next fork (Istanbul) which would be roughly 8 months after Constantinople, but based on past timeline over runs this is more likely to be a 10-11 months long gap. Therefore we are looking at a timeline of 12-14+ months before ProgPOW is implemented, maybe sometime Sep-Nov 2019. I thought 2019 – early 2020 was the new timeframe given for beacon chain Casper?
Does that mean ProgPOW will only be operational for 0-6 months before POS? If so, why are we giving it one of the limited EIP slots in Istanbul (each EIP requires time and resources to test, only 3 actual updates are making it into Constantinople)? And if not, does that mean everyone involved already knows or assumes that Casper will be delayed until much later….again?
-During the Issuance debate representatives of the big mining pools got the majority of talking time regarding issuance. Their proposal initially wanted to just kill the difficulty bomb(they only changed to delay right before the call, after realizing killing the bomb nuked their EIPs community support), and they are the ones pushing ProgPOW.
Both during the call and in forums afterwards they pushed a straw man argument about uncles, quoting numbers as if the proposal to reduce the block rewards to 1 ETH wouldn’t reduce uncle rewards correspondingly as common sense would dictate. As if their proposal was the only one that dealt with uncles, and as if uncles are a bigger threat to network security than inflation that is set to increase the supply far beyond what we had come to expect. The example was given that uncle rewards should be lowered significantly, but not block rewards, because the uncles are going to miners with less sophisticated setups…..you mean the ones that don’t belong to the major pools you represent???? Centralizing cartels much?
-I know we don’t like to talk about price here, it’s considered low class, but I think what some people fail to understand is that once you leave the small stage of hobbyist mining and go industrial, price is the single biggest factor in network security. Miners mine for profit. If there is profit to be made they will mine. But they need someone to sell to for that profit to exist, so investors have to be willing to pay a high enough price to keep miners satisfied. Investors are no longer happy buying, this is the second bomb delay and it’s coming when they were expecting to have initial Casper by now. Not just a general expectation, but a firm “Casper is done and we can roll it out early to combat ASICs if required” kind of expectation. Now that expectation was shattered and the investors goodwill and faith in Ethereum devs has been shaken to its very core. This is showing in the price, we are seeing the effects of loss of confidence as ETH is worth less now than it was 12 months ago.
And now these miners are arguing against an issuance reduction, and using the low price as justification…don’t they realize that without a VERY strong move to show good faith these investors may not just stop buying but decide to get out altogether. What happens if investors join the miners in dumping ETH on the market? How many of them will be making enough to justify their mining operations? How many ongoing dapps will keep confidence in the Ethereum platform when, not only is it not scaling on the schedule there were developing for, but now the value of their raised ICO ETH to fund that development is cut by over 90%.
Please Ethereum Devs, don’t let us go the way of Bitcoin, with stagnating chain development (ProgPOW vs POS), with miners and big venture funds taking control. Many users and developers moved from Bitcoin to Ethereum to avoid these exact types of self-interested parties making self-interested decisions that affected the entire community.
About Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.
Author: TheBounceSpotter
Score: 100
Don’t forget to share the post if you love it !
