Ethereum Core Devs Meeting 46 Agenda

[lrettig]

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting 46 Agenda

Meeting Date/Time: Friday 14 Sept 2018 at 14:00 UTC

Meeting Duration 1.5 hours

YouTube Live Stream Link

Livepeer Stream Link

Constantinople Progress

Agenda

1. Testing
2. Client Updates
3. Research Updates
4. Constantinople
   a. Client progress.
   b. Ropsten block number.
   c. Can we do it before Devcon?

Time-allowing:

5. EIP-1380: Reduced gas cost for call to self
6. EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs
7. EIP-1057 (ProgPoW) and EIP-1355 (Ethash1a)

[jacqueswww]

Hi There! I am eager to discuss reducing the gas fee on self-calls (private/internal calls). EIP-1380 https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/1380/files.

[chfast]

I don't mind having it this week, but we agreed to have it one week later.

[5chdn]

Please make it Sept 14 👍

[lrettig]

Hi guys, if it was already agreed that the next meeting would be next week, no worries. My fault for being out of the loop thanks to burning man :) I pinged @Souptacular to check but I think he's in transit to Berlin. Fixed!

[MoneroCrusher]

In my opinion issuance reduction & ASIC fork-off has to happen at the same time. With a issuance reduction only you are only accomodating 'investors' who have a very biased view and only want to make money by reducing inflation, it won't work anyway. As a bad side-effect the network will also experience an extreme shift towards hashrate centralization.
What is far more important is utility tokens & projects wanting to build their platform on the Ethereum network to have a stable underlying protocol without the risk of a centralized network and its implications.

Potential industries will only adopt or even consider their projects when they know the underlying protocol - Ethereum - is absolutely secure as a disruption (i.e. 51% attack, censoring of certain transactions, just imagine one industry trying to sabotage ERC20 token transaction of a competitor for a huge shipment in the shipping industry) could cause huge problems & uncertainty. The real & ultimate value in Ethereum lies in the utility tokens & smart contracts, not in reducing inflation from i.e. 7% to 4.5%. That's just gimmick & fairy dust and a desperate attempt from 'investors' to easen their bags.

Behold, miners are not less greedy (actually they are supposed to be greedy in this game theoretical protocol) but unlike 'investors' they fulfill a crucial function and bring actual value: security of the network.
So I'd advise you to reconsider your last stance of making a issuance-only without a ASIC-fork-off.

In the meantime ProgPOW is already live on a mainnet. Check out Bitcoin Interest (no endorsement). The block height for the fork was reached today and they're officially & successfully running ProgPOW. You can use that as a 'testnet' if you will & see that the algorithm is flawless and works as intended.
Now it's up to you to lead this project into a success and it will only happen if you uphold the core value of the protocol: smart contracts & decentralization (AKA security).

Edit
as a bonus: Investors will most likely even make a bigger return that way, in the longer term

[sinabl]

I’m in full agreement with what Monerocrusher has written. In addition, centralization by miners will force the Eth team to ultimately cater more to their demands than the original neutral vision that It was founded upon. Let’s have a serious discussion on this topic in the meeting, There is absolutely nothing wrong with performing another fork in November if its decided in the meeting to move forward with ProgPOW

[MoneroCrusher]

Absolutely agree. I don't want to imagine the propaganda that will be thrown around by the big ASIC manufacturers when ETH finally switches to PoS.
Their hardware value & investments will go to zero, while GPU's value doesn't (it can be used for a lot of other stuff and also other coins).
Therefore you will have a smoother transition to PoS if you keep GPU miners in the game.

If you embrace ASICs now, miners will slowly adapt & get ASICs themselves and it will be even harder to get consensus and the community split will be more drastic.

It is absolutely critical to form an opinion about ASICs fast and clearly communicate what you will do about it. It's a big problem and I feel like the devs don't even fully realize it yet.

[Nmining]

I´m afraid there is already wavering in networks ,and miners are already switching coins. Eth value is getting very low(173usd) . https://ethermine.org/statistics. Moving to Progpow asap should at least give more hope for gpu mining in Eth.

[5chdn]

Don't want to rush things, but regarding 4) Constantinople:

• Shall we discuss a block number for Ropsten? (Would be nice.)
• Is Constantinople still realistically happening before Devcon4? (Doubt that.)

Edit, also let's update Meta EIP-1013: ethereum/EIPs#1366

@5chdn I think it is a right time to discuss a block number for ropsten network, most of the clients are now ready 👍

[ytrezq]

@lrettig what about ᴇɪᴘ86 which was planned to be implemented in Metropolis ?

[MariusVanDerWijden]

I would like to talk about EIP-1057 (ProgPoW) and EIP-1355 (Ethash1a)
to give a timeline what we, the ethminer community, think what has to happen before we use them. Forking the consensus algorithm isn't as easy as Bitcoin Interest makes it seem. All miners, nodes and even light clients such as wallets have to be updated in order to accommodate the new algorithm.

My main concern with ProgPoW is, that it was introduced by a company that specialize in providing special mining software. The open source community needs more time to analyse the characteristics of ProgPow before we can fork. Otherwise for profit companies could sell their mining software which outperforms the open source variants not by 3-5% (like now) but by way more (15+%). This would lead to a centralization of mining power again, controlled by the companies that provide the mining software.

Therefore, we propose with Ethash1a EIP-1355 a minor change in the algorithm which would buy us more time to analyse ProgPoW.

[MoneroCrusher]

@MariusVanDerWijden
Supporting this. Buys time and allows for everyone to look into a permanent solution. I would even suggest making a dedicated HF for the permanent ASIC resistant PoW solution. Why wait for Istanbul HF if the solution is found after i.e. 2-3 months?
No need to risk the big masses adopting to ASICs because then you've crossed the event horizon and you can't go back without a community split.
Luckily right now ASICs are exotic and only found in huge farms and manufacturer's farms. But they will try to get them out there in the wild as fast as possible once they see that there is a serious interest in forking their ASICs off.

[mdaria510]

If issuance is reduced without something done about ASICs then it will be completely counter productive. There are no hobbyist ASIC miners. All ASIC miners will ever do is sell everything they mine, and they will sell quickly. Not dealing with this problem now is making a deal with the devil and making it more difficult to change things further down the line.

Fact: Reducing issuance will put pressure on mining economics, such that the proportional of hash owned by ASICs must go up. At best you could argue that it might only go up a little bit, but it can only increase.

Supposedly the issuance reduction is to throw a bone to "investors" by cutting down on inflation. I know many "investors", and I have never met a single "investor" that said "the reason I'm selling ETH is because inflation is too high." No. The reason they're selling ETH is because the price is bleeding more and more, and they're losing faith. Average joe investor is very quickly shedding the belief that ETH is "the next bitcoin."

Cutting the inflation will obviously prop up the price to some degree - in the long run. But you can't make a case for it turning around the current bleeding. The total effect is going to be a few % at best, the kind of swing we see on a daily basis. The net effect of that change will take months to years to work out.

Cut off the GPU miners though, and you've dramatically increased selling pressure on day one after the fork because a much larger percent of mined ETH is going to be dumped by big centralized miners starting immediately after the fork, and it'll never stop. The block reward issuance will reduce the amount of ETH rewarded, but will not significantly reduce the amount of ETH sold by miners on the market. It might even increase it. There is a very real risk that it actually suppresses price in the short term. And at this stage, suppressing price in the short term is suppressing price in the long term.

At this early stage you should never lose sight of how immature the market is. "Investors" are not responding to fundamentals like inflation rate. "Investors" are not looking at supply. They're just not. Most don't even know what it is or where to find it. How else can you explain XLM and XRP having such huge valuations even though only a tiny fraction of the supply is even circulating, and the rest is held by centralized power? By fundamentals those tokens should be near worthless, but instead they're near the top of the pack. All "investors" are looking at is the price and the direction it's heading, and handing over mining to ASIC farms is going to increase selling pressure, suppress the price and drive new investors away.

I can't take the "there's no time to do anything" argument seriously if there's actually a simple way to brick current ASICs and at least buy some time. If you ignore the concerns of GPU miners, not only would you be biting the hand that fed you over the past few years, you're trading a friendly idealistic bunch with a large percentage of holders and true believers for ruthless corporations that will not hesitate to bite back. If you dismiss this threat today, by the time you casually get around to dealing with it you'll have a much steeper hill to climb with much more resistance from organized opponents that have no interest in Ethereum whatsoever beyond mining and selling it. They will stir up an order of magnitude more chaos and divisiveness than a bunch of random GPU miners could ever hope to. If the price of ETH actually does pump over the next few years, that's going to be worth billions to Bitmain and friends. If the price dumps, mining returns will drop so low (especially with the BR decrease) that they'll end up owning more and more of it of the mining rewards. In either case, they'll have incentive to battle devs at every step, especially when they're an entrenched power. They're not going to roll over without a fight like most GPU miners. They will not be casually dismissed, and they will derail every and any plan developers have that goes against their interests. You need to cut the cancer out before it grows and spreads. That's why ASIC resistance was a core tenet of Ethereum from the start right? Assuming you can handle this at your leisure is not a safe assumption. Ignore it at your peril.

I get that punting ASIC resistance to the next fork is the easy thing to do, and reducing inflation is the easy thing to do to increase price. But the easy thing to do is rarely the right thing to do, there will be a price to pay down the line for taking the easy way out today. Every plan the dev team has is in jeopardy if you hand over running the network to people who have zero interest in seeing those plans come to fruition.