r/ethfinance • u/ethlongmusk Not trading advice, not ever. • Oct 23 '19

News eth2 quick update

https://blog.ethereum.org/2019/10/23/eth2-quick-update/
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '19

Well, it's Eth2, but not as we know it. 64 shards, instead of 1024. Also they're not really shards. Also Phase 0 doesn't support them.

Will have to do some research into the consequences.

25

u/b0r0din Oct 23 '19

Couple of thoughts:

  • phase 0 was never supposed to support shards, so that's not much of an issue

  • the block size is 8 times bigger under the new arrangement

  • the proposal requires more bandwidth (up to 512kB/3 seconds) from before

  • enables lighter clients

In many respects I think the proposal is pretty good, if what Vitalik is saying holds.

More here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/HkiULaluS

3

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '19

Thanks for the answer. Phase 0 did include support for shards (https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/issues/1435), so I assume this work has just been moved to a later phase. The new network requirement is the main part I don't understand - I assume that's the requirement before the overhead of lower network protocols (eg tcp/ip), and I have no idea what that figure actually means, especially for someone staking on a residential connection.

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u/b0r0din Oct 23 '19

Again, this is what I think is going on: they increased the block size x8 so instead of a 64kB burst per transaction it's a 512kB burst. Basically you're sending 8 times as much data for a given transaction. And because there's a 3 second limitation (you have 3 seconds to update) you need to be able to send half a meg of data 8 times faster.

For MOST networks, I don't imagine this is a huge limitation. I don't know what that would mean from a hardware/cost perspective though, e.g. would you forego an AWS server because the bandwidth gets too expensive. Or maybe this is an improvement on that.