SOTS #34: EthStaker Community Call with Danny Ryan, How Ethereum Scales, and What's next in 2021

Transcript

01:14 - Welcome to 2021, this is episode 34

[Music] hey super fizz here this is going to be episode 34 of state of the state one of the things i hate is recording over and over in multiple takes but i got this new setup and i was supposed to practice with it jeremiah nichol kept giving me hints and i was supposed to be practicing but i didn't practice so i just did this once and it didn't record so i'm trying it again uh you don't care about any of that so this is going to be what i'm going to call season two of

state of the state i did a bunch of these videos 32 of them 33 of them in 2020 and they seem to be pretty well received by people and so i thought why not try to do a hundred of them in 2021 this year i have engineering support from michael geesen from unvetica.com michael has become a great friend and he really gets this visual presentation stuff and so he offered to help out um by engineering and producing and publishing these videos and so i'm really grateful to him for taking that stress off of me so that hopefully i can sit down and do a one-shot single take and be done today i want to talk about something

03:09 - Overview of Community Call #15 w/ Danny Ryan

really exciting yesterday eatstaker met with um danny ryan from the ethereum foundation danny ryan is technically a researcher but his actual role is kind of a bridge between ethereum research and ethereum implementation or what you call ethereum 2 implementation danny essentially takes the research end and writes an implementation spec and that spec is then used by software implementers to develop eth2 clients and those are the things that we know as lighthouse prism nimbus and tekku and so every week they have a meeting and they talk about their status toward implementation and they

they work to make sure they're all on the same page and this these implementation teams had a fantastic success in december on december 1st 2020 when they released the the beacon chain uh the vegan chain went live we had a great celebration with eat staker and uh it was awesome it's incredible like all of these years of research um essentially since metallic saying in 2014 talking about this whole idea of serenity of proof of stake of more transactions that finally took a massive step into reality on december 1st with the liveness of the beacon chain and six weeks later the beacon chain is

humming along perfectly i dare say that it has exceeded everyone's expectations there were a lot of test nets that had some shaky ground because of nothing at stake problems but when mainnet went live we saw the the finality of all of this work coming together in the beacon chain a lot of people don't really grasp why ethereum 2 is such a big deal why the beacon chain is such a big deal because there are so many of these distributed proof of stake networks or other networks that have used part of this research to implement a network

04:05 - How Ethereum scales compared to other “PoS-like” systems

but i really suggest that you look at the work by vlad zamfir into uh the scalability trilemma and some of that will help you understand why casper ffg is such a great finality system and why the ethereum 2 network is such an awesome marvel and maybe that's something i'll go into a little later but suffice it to say that the beacon chain is the pinnacle of research for uh proof of stake networks uh and it really is an awesome thing so beyond that you know we're looking forward to 2021

06:44 - What’s next for Ethereum in 2021?

with a beacon chain and the question becomes what's next a lot of us have known for a long time that that the deployment of eth2 was in phases we had phase 0 phase 1 phase 1.5 and phase 2. those things are kind of gone now in more favor of a parallel approach so phase zero was the launch of the beacon chain and that's been done the next phases were the merge of the eth1 chain onto eth2 and sharding and so sharding is trucking along not something i want to focus on right now what i want to talk about is the merge of eth one under eth2 and there were a lot of ways that this was discussed

at one point the prevailing attitude was um eth one would become a shard on eth2 one of the 64 shards and there's some new um some new developments that kind of changed the way that might work in the past few weeks the teku client did some experimentation with um kind of bolting on the proof of stake consensus mechanism on to geth and so essentially what this means is exchanging that proof-of-work mining consensus model for a proof-of-stake consensus model that's held in heath 2.

this is kind of a big deal essentially what this means is that eth1 doesn't have to take a shard on eth2 instead it can continue to run on the same chain with a new consensus model that being the proof of state consensus model providing finality so we get all of the benefits all of the improvements of proof of stake especially like the lower energy use which is something i really want to talk about this year without any of the real losses and so each one can continue to chug along the beacon chain can continue to do its thing and when they're ready shards can be

added to expand capacity right now we have a lot of layer two solutions that are stepping up to provide this capacity improvement so the future is really bright i would not be surprised by mid-year to see some some public proofs of concepts for exchanging this proof-of-work finality mechanism for the proof of stake finality mechanism in eth1 it's really exciting um yeah so that's where we're at right now the research is it seems to be really solidifying it's to the point where as an

07:44 - Closing comments

end user i understand a lot of the big picture where for a long time it seemed to change so frequently that i really couldn't um couldn't lock it down but i understand some of the broad strokes now the broad strokes being that the beacon chain works um that proof of stake can be implemented as a finality engine in eth1 that shards can come before or after the merge and so this is all just very exciting stuff and uh yeah i'm really looking forward to the year i hope if you have any questions you'll ask them below and again thanks to michael for offering to produce these videos

i hope it looks well looks good i might not look at it at all but i appreciate your feedback take care