Istanbul creates divisions, Ethereum 2.0 a step closer

The planned hard fork Istanbul from Ethereum has been widely discussed since the announcement in 2018. And now, after the weekend that Istanbul was launched, the controversy is still not completely gone.

The latest network upgrade from Ethereum, Istanbul, went live this week on block number 9,069,000.

Six major changes

Istanbul contains six different upgrades to improve performance. For example, adjust the costs of opcodes, it is also ensured that Ethereum and Zcash can work better together and more creative functions are made possible through smart contracts. In addition, the network is technically prepared to switch to Proof-of-Stake.

Miners and nodes on the Ethereum network must update their clients. The following six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are then implemented:

• EIP-152: making BLAKE2b more cost efficient,
• EIP-1108: lower alt_bn128 gas costs,
• EIP-1344: implementation of the ChainID opcode,
• EIP-1884: increase gas costs for tri-size dependent opcodes to prevent spam attacks,
• EIP-2028: reducing gas costs for transaction data, improving the efficiency of transactions using zero-knowledge SNARKs and STARKs,
• EIP-2200: implementation of net gas measurement for SSTORE operations.

Smart contracts and DApps

The controversy surrounding Istanbul stems from the fact that 680 smart will break Aragon contracts. Gas prices are hard-coded for most of these smart contracts.

The implementation of the Kyber Network sidechain will also be affected, making token swaps more expensive than before the upgrade. Many DApps also have to be rewritten.

At the time of writing, Ethernodes says that almost 4% of the nodes have not yet implemented the upgrade. Although this means that the vast majority of the network has accepted Istanbul’s upgrade, social media are concerned that Ethereum is becoming too centralized. Certainly if you compare that with how the Ethereum blockchain was initially designed.

Centralization played a role

These concerns are also due to Parity, this is a popular Ethereum client. She announced that users had to perform some sort of emergency patch in order to accept the upgrade to Istanbul. Parity represents almost 23% of the network. Parity’s Shasper also participates in a public multi-client test nest known as “Sapphire”.

I find the Ethereum communities dependence on Parity concerning. Yesterday’s emergency release underscores a long line of poor quality control practices at Parity.

– Austin Roberts (@austinrobertsiv) December 6, 2019

The upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, with Proof-of-Stake as the biggest promise, will take place at the beginning of 2020. Matt Odell wrote a long one here thread on Twitter. Comes down to:

PoS chains naturally centralize validation under stock exchanges, ETFs and other depositaries. And these are the easiest companies to regulate. Satoshi’s most important innovation is distributed PoW, not blockchain. Yet half of this industry still thinks that PoW is the problem that needs to be solved.