"A modest proposal": Vitalik reveals Ethereum's vision for several years

A skinny 23-year-old hacker with a green "Doge" shirt gave us an answer today. At the main Ethereum conference, Devcon, the creator of the project, Vitalik Buterin, revealed that he has been quietly working on a new long-term plan for the future of the blockchain network. What he called a "modest proposal" is perhaps best described as a three to four year roadmap for the technical development of Ethereum.

Notably, at the heart of the vision is a long technical change in the manufacture of Ethereum called "sharding", and although it was always expected to be included in the plans of the protocol, Buterin proposed today what could be his most solid strategy for the technique until the date.

As such, the roadmap alludes to problems that have not yet been resolved in the platform and emphasizes scalability for project developers. As the etheric nodes need to store everything that happened on the network, Buterin emphasized that there is a need for solutions that mitigate costly storage costs that could escalate exponentially as the system expands.

It is a topic that has long been in the forefront for the developer, as Buterin recently launched new research to alleviate this problem.

Even so, the talk was evidence of its emphasis on finding solutions, and of its efforts to galvanize the developers of ethereum more broadly so that they are thinking about the effort.

"The amount of activity in the Blockchain is much greater than it was a couple of years ago," he said, noting the daily transaction rates and the more than 20,000 nodes that are now part of the network.

With this, he suggested that Ethereum is running against its limits.

Buterin told the audience :

"Scalability is probably the number one problem. There is a graveyard of systems that claim to solve the scalability problem but they do not. It is a very significant and difficult challenge. It's about known facts. "

High level details

And Buterin believes that fragmentation is the "likely" solution to this problem.

A way to divide the data into subsets that is inspired by traditional databases, the idea is that each node only has to store a small portion of the total network. However, the vision is that the underlying mathematics would keep the system accountable, and if they needed it, the nodes could depend on other nodes to obtain data.

How to execute this in practice, and safely, without nodes that send false information to other nodes, is another issue that researchers have been investigating. But Buterin is proposing a new type of fragmentation infrastructure that would solve both scalability and governance, ensuring that the eventual system is well maintained and kept under control.

The proposal revealed today is that the Ethereum be divided into different types of fragments. There will be the main fragment, which would comprise the current Ethereum network; then there would be new fragments that Buterin calls "other universes."

Crucially, Buterin believes that the partition would allow more aggressive changes in the smaller fragments and more cautious changes in the main block chain. In this way, Ethereum still has platform stability, while developers still have room to try new changes and experiment and move quickly in the other fragments.

Or as Buterin expressed it :

"Other universes where all these things that we have been working on in recent years can be deployed much faster."

Looking forward

The Buterin roadmap also includes other changes, although these were less promising in your talk.

These include planned updates to the ethereum virtual machine (EVM), the technology that today compiles the smart contract code and communicates it to the network. He also tackled another long-term technological project, eWASM, to run Ethereum in a web browser, which hints at the need to guarantee this system, given that the EVM has also been implemented in other Blockchain projects.

Another proposed idea was for so-called "stateless clients", which deals with how customers could synchronize with the network more quickly.

"Each time you will hear more about this project," he said. He invited the developers to contribute to the effort, much of the research is on GitHub.

But in general, sharding seems to be the biggest change in the next three or four years, and Buterin ended up adding that there is already development work in these exploratory areas.

Notably, he hinted that the work could be more advanced than previously thought.

Buterin concluded :

"We are basically only a few centimeters from a proof of concept in Python."

Source: CoinDesk