Ethereum's Roadmap - Hudson Jameson at Construct 2017 Conference

good morning everybody all right so I'm here to speak on ethereum uh what we've done so far what we're planning on doing talk about our ecosystem and community so um let's get started so we're going to go through uh the ethereum road map what we know so far um the software ecosystem uh you know what tools are out there what tools are currently being developed a lot of them you're going to see in Deep dive sessions and in uh product demos and all kinds of stuff throughout the day and then what makes us different what does the ethereum community value and what makes us you know sets us apart from other crypto projects decentralized uh application projects all right so whoops go this way cool so where we've then um January 2015 is when vitalic buan uh formally announced ethereum at the North American Bitcoin conference uh that was kind of the start of people getting excited publicly about ethereum it kind of set things in motion um we uh you know had a crowd sale after that and then in July 2015 uh we uh started the frontier phase actually that should be January 2014 my bad July 2015 we started the frontier phase which is when the blockchain actually went live so when you're thinking like as we're I'm going through these developments consider that the ethereum blockchain itself is less than 2 years old uh March 2016 we had Homestead it had a lot of protocol improvements so um just a lot of things that helped kind of speed up transactions make things more reliable kind of coming out of an alphabeta phase uh so right now what do we got going on we have light clients uh that are very efficient uh there is a lot of mobile adap development and embedded dap development going on uh so for instance status.im is a mobile Android um ethereum app that you can pretty much run any ethereum dap that runs on a website on status uh you can go in it also have uh incorporates whisper the decentralized uh peer-to-peer messaging system that ethereum has and it has um just all kinds of really really neat features it uses like clients to make it so that as a consumer you don't have to have the whole blockchain on your phone you can just uh use external servers and uh even you know your own like client server on your phone to just get the data that you need um the uh mobile and invented devices there's also Raspberry Pi beagle bone integration uh all kinds of stuff that stays very well updated um smart contract safety and formal verification that's kind of some of the hot topics are the smart contract security because you hear about all these blockchain projects that have you know flaws or that are not properly vetted so we have an excellent team at the foundation and in the community that is going through and doing groundbreaking uh cryptographic research on how to secure these smart contracts and how to make it so that you know people don't mess up and inadvertently uh create smart contracts that can cause losers to uh not use the smart contracts correctly pretty much because there's a lot of things you can mess up when you're trying to do something from scratch solidity is a very new language so that there's a lot of uh development that's going to be happening over uh that's already happened and it's going to be happening that will make it a whole lot more secure and then interest for many Industries uh ethereum has had a lot of interest in the Enterprise sector um we have a lot of Banks energy uh industry you know tracking all kinds of stuff and use cases that have been explored and that uh people are just kind of getting into small groups and figuring out on their own they're starting to be more of a uh more of a like people getting together and trying to make consortiums their self and Joe Luben is going to be talking uh later about Enterprise ethereum groups and just kind of where that landscape is and where ethereum's been uh so he'll give a more detailed talk on that so where are we going we're going to Metropolis so that is the next uh phase of ethereum development so uh basically like we just went through Frontier was the launch Homestead was a lot of the upgrades and uh things that made the network more stable and then Metropolis goes through and provides a lot more flexibility for smart contract developers they put things where smart contracts uh can you know pay their own fees so when you send a transaction you don't have to um uh externally you know fund it every time something is ran the smart contract itself can uh fund the transactions going forward um initial steps toward ethereum abstraction to me this is one of the coolest things because what that means is that we're going to take ethereum and right now you have to you know download an ethereum client and um basically use that client and it has the blockchain the logic layer the storage layer the consensus layer all packaged in and if you want to change any of that you have to go in and uh you know do soft Forks or hard forks and if you're an Enterprise you have to go in and just mutilate the code and get your own consensus mechanism in there but what abstraction is going to do uh what we're calling AB abstraction is uh the ability to swap out consensus protocols Within ethereum the ability to have uh you know different types of account security so right now we have to use the account uh security mechanisms uh that Bitcoin and that uh ethereum use when you know you're creating a public private key but later you can use Lamport signatures or you can use RSA or you know infinite possibilities within what your use cases either and like a private setting a Consortium blockchain and combining that with all of the things uh that people are doing trying to interconnect blockchains makes it super super powerful um I feel like that's going to definitely be the future and then of course uh kind of setting the groundwork for scalability Solutions including uh sharding which I'm going to talk more about in a second ooh ZK snarks that's definitely a hot word right now hot hot phrase so uh ZK snarks are zero knowledge proofs so it is a way to have Anonymous uh transactions of value right now uh zcash is the uh basically the first ones who have a widely known public chain um ZK snark system they launched in December and uh their team has been super friendly to us we have a really good relationship with them so we're starting to do work to enable ZK snarks on ethereum um and the interesting thing is that there is this collaboration even though we are different projects because we're really doing this for the good of you know having this you know decentralized technology and pushing the agenda forward it's not about profit or not about the kind of stuff that some you know blockchain and cryptocurrency projects go for we really just want to make really cool stuff and help you know Society by making these things that support uh censorship resistance and decentralization so uh on the technical side of that basically uh we don't have support for a certain type of um elliptic curve cryptography method in ethereum so we're adding that in uh during metropolis and uh just kind of working out the details of that right now and how that's going to work uh we have everything else to support it already um and then in the future you know with abstraction coming full force that's going to be even more possibilities around snarks all right super cool stuff after Metropolis is Serenity um we know Metropolis is going to be in the next 3 to six months we don't know when Serenity is going to be but um this is going to be when you know the really big stuff hits we're changing from uh proof of work to proof of stake uh right now we're leaning on you know the Casper consensus algorithm which Vlad zenier is going to talk about uh in a deep dive session later today so uh what that's going to do uh for those who are not familiar with proof of stake uh proof of work you know is just like the Bitcoin network does that you have miners that uh um you know are using their computing power and burning electricity in order to secure the coins so uh proof of stake is going to do is you have um coins that you kind of lock into these contracts on the network and you have virtual miners so you abide by a set of rules to lock your coins in and that makes you a virtual minor that um onchain has the ability to approve of transactions and act as a minor securing the network without having to expend uh costly external resources and hurt the environment with a lot of this uh heat production and energy cost that comes with proof of work in most cases um finish abstraction on ethereum so uh I talked about a little bit in the last slide but um additionally what we're trying to do is um have just a lot more flexibility with what people want to do there's you know sometimes big debates about utxo um transaction models versus you know what ethereum uses and so having this abstraction from the uh logic layer and the storage layer you can put utxo based token Management on the ethereum blockchain uh you can have advanced contract execution schemes so uh the ability to have um contracts like I said pay for their own transactions which is a huge step in M having smart contracts be more autonomous and not have to um be activated by outside influence necessarily and then blockchain sharding um what sharding does right now when you have blockchains there's a single blockchain and in that blockchain you have whatever consensus algorithm and everyone's uh downloaded the entire chain so everyone has the same copy and so everyone can verify and everyone gets updated in relatively the same amount of time what sharding does is it cuts the blockchain into hundreds or thousands of pieces so that each node that is running only has to approve of their piece that their Shard of the network and that sounds insecure because it's like well how do they know about all the other pieces but what we're working on is a solution to take Merkel Roots uh so the thing that kind of structures a lot of the transaction receipts um and you know transaction uh stuff in both Bitcoin and ethereum and we're going to make it so that every Shard has a Merkel proof that can then compare across each other and make it so that it has a um a strong sense of consensus shards can talk across from each other uh cross communicate and there's still a lot of research to be done in this it's definitely not something that's in stone right now which is why there's not really an estimated time uh for serenity to come out but the research is really promising it there's you know some channels on gter that we uh a lot of people participate in and it's really groundbreaking stuff from from both Academia and uh just you know normal people who have really good ideas or who are uh you know hobbyist cryptographers who come in and help us with a lot of this uh including the economic theory there's also um some things that we're going to do to decrease block time uh theoretically with blockchain sharding you can uh bring the block time down significantly uh you can also have tens of thousands thorough put of transactions eventually when Serenity first comes out it's probably not going to be that uh way exactly there's definitely going to be higher thorough put of transactions but the goal is to uh set up a structure through abstraction to be able to iterate on each part of the ethereum protocol uh in a way that's more simple that's not all interconnected and that allows for these type of innovations that I've described so ethereum uh software ecosystem uh what a lot of people don't realize is just how much it's actually overwhelming sometimes how much has been done in the ethereum ecosystem so what I got right here little bubbles that describe uh what's going on in the ethereum ecosystem from kind of a high level so uh let's start with clients uh ethereum uh does not have we basically Implement a uh a protocol standard and then the clients follow that standard rather than having a like core reference uh client that everyone follows and that is the standard so what that means is you can take our uh you know protocol specification and implemented into a lot of different programming languages without having to rely on the core codebase of any others so we have as you can see C++ Java Ruby and I actually didn't even list them all I think there's a few more hascal included uh clients that you can you know take the codebase for and just right off the bat connect to the ethereum network uh there's also um Dev tools so uh I know metamask is here uh and they're going to be uh talking during a learning session uh there's solidity which is our um uh smart contract language there's Embark and truffle which are uh AB tools to create uh solidity abstractions and to help uh people create and test their smart contracts and then uh all the IDE icons uh are going and like text uh processor icons are programs that have ethereum plugins for uh lenting and all these other things so really there's just a variety if you want to jump into ethereum development there's a lot of tools right there and it's really easy to get into um the Enterprise on the far left is going to be um what the future of ethereum is going to look like outside of of the public scope so we have block apps monax uh tendermint JP Morgan's Quorum uh you know hao's uh project with hydr chain on the uh far left the mushroom looking one that's a really cool logo so uh they what they're working on is having alternative uh consensus mechanisms so sometimes proof of stake sometimes different round robin protocols because a lot of the time when you're working with uh different businesses you don't necessarily need need like you need to have some sense of decentralization but you kind of trust who you're working with there if you have like 10 or 100 companies and you know them all and you know what their addresses are and it's not Anonymous or pseudo Anonymous you don't really need that you you can kind of uh assist in that tradeoff of trust and uh scalability so what they're trying to do is get uh bigger block uh transaction thorough put they're trying to uh iterate on talking between different blockchains and a ton of other cool things there's um a few different Enterprise deep Dives throughout this conference uh we got daps uport is here uh nosis is here uh oracy is here and then there's been some other kind of um popular daps that have popped up recently including First Blood aasha project Oaken uh and then finally and probably most importantly we have a very very strong Community we have a very active uh Reddit uh we have dozens of GitHub or gter channels that are all hours of the day people coming in and like I I really got interested in ethereum because it's super approachable like you can be on Reddit and just you know in a thread be like oh hey core developer of ethereum or dap developer what's this new uh thing that's going on how do I fix this uh we have a stack exchange that has hundreds of questions answered in there and uh we have meetups from all around the world some of them topping a thousand members uh in bigger cities like Berlin and London so uh generally you'll be able to find a Meetup in your city especially if you live in a bigger city or a metropolitan area so it's just a thriving community and we've been able to keep it that way a very focused uh you know non uh nonviolent I guess non yell non you know all that stuff toxic I guess would be the word uh community so it's really enjoyable to go to those meetups and talk to people even though there's sometimes really awkward nerds who don't get out much and they're you know haven't seen the sunlight in a few weeks hey yeah all right so what makes ethereum different to me what makes ethereum different and a lot more attractive as a product for one thing you know we get we we have a track record a you know a GitHub history of going through planning and executing even if we're doing it faster than a lot of people you know think we should even if they're calling it unsafe we you know go fast and we get things done we have a blockchain that works it's getting battle tested we've had multiple attacks and other uh types of problems or issues on the blockchain that we've quickly overcome uh through cohesiveness across multiple developer groups and multiple client groups that you know generally wouldn't necessarily be friends we kind of all came out of the same mold and if you look on the left side there is is um all the uh groups of Devcon so at the very top left there's Devcon zero uh middle is Devcon one bottom is Devcon 2 so you can see every Devcon we growing a number of developers and attendees it's more than doubled every year Devcon is our developer focused conference uh super cool event like it's it's not one of those kind of events where you go and it's all these businesses pitching stuff it's like super super technical protocol level bunch of really shy guys getting on stage and talking about what they've been doing for 6 months with no one around so um bottom right that's to me representative of the Cross uh application and cross blockchain uh protocol support that we're trying to get into including snarks uh we're good friends with the zcash team we're good friends with ipfs uh we're good friend like we really have a really inclusive community like we are you know really happy to work with anyone who wants to further the uh decentralized nature of Technologies and really push this movement forward and then yeah top right is one of the meetups one of the more popular ones uh and in the middle we have Doge theum so that kind of shows that like if you go into the subreddit or if you see a lot of like what some of our you know a lot of the more prominent members of our community uh Jeff who's the go lead developer vitalic some of the more famous trolls of ethereum on Twitter they're making jokes all the time it's a laid it's a laid-back environment you have to get through with humor you everything can't be super serious all the time so uh yeah we a lot of people in the ethereum community really like Doge and that to me that kind of shows a sense of laidback a sense of you know being able to take humor in things and you can make jokes about State channels and make jokes about silly things going on in cryptocurrency battles and stuff so lastly there's a scavenger hunt it's starting tomorrow it's cross blockchain it involves ethereum Bitcoin zcash and ipfs uh we're going to be posting more about how to get involved in that uh it's going to be mostly digital but there are some physical aspects don't worry you're not going to have to run you're not going to have to go that far off site we can all still be lazy uh it's almost entirely digital and and it involves a lot of ethereum smart contracts and other components there's a really cool zcash uh method that um Jay and Zuko and others are working on and helping with it's going to be really really awesome so yeah that is uh my presentation questions can that happen sweet anyone have questions change your mind it's okay and there oh we is there a microphone or oh yeah so the question was am I going to be posting the slides yep I'll post on my Twitter and my website I usually try to do that so yeah the slides will be I'm uh at Hudson Jameson and Hudson jameson.com and uh yeah what other questions um hi there yeah so uh I saw on one of your slides uh you're looking at Advanced contract execution schemes I was just wondering if you could mention a bit more about that whether they'll happen onchain offchain it's going to be a combination so there's obviously things that everyone's heard about like State channels and that's going to play a big part there's a lot of uh cool projects that are outside of ethereum's core development including uh Raiden and Gollum which are kind of um Raiden is pretty much like lightning Network style uh implementation on top of ethereum uh Gollum is a distributed uh computation market so uh both of those you know powered by ethereum at their core and then within the actual core protocol there is some stuff that you can't really do uh very well so for instance a contract can't uh hold its own ether and or no a contract can hold its own ether it can't like execute and send that ether after the fact so you have to you have to poke it you have to say hey do this function and you have to supply the transaction fees as the user who e is either using the contract or who wants someone else to use the contract so now with smart contracts paying their own fees it makes it a little bit easier for the user to not have to guess uh when they're going in and trying to uh initiate a smart contract and additionally uh it helps with you know keeping that nebulous part of what the transaction fees is going to be today put that on the smart contract developer and not the user who doesn't want to do that we want ethereum to be behind the scenes you shouldn't know you're using ethereum if this if this is in the real world it'll be a a back-in system that's going to you know connect everything we this we don't want it to interfere with the users we're going to make it as user friendly as we can uh next question uh the question was what kind of events uh trigger contract execution and what was it again in the next version so uh Metropolis it's not there's not going to be too many changes with that yet it's more Serenity so uh in Serenity there might be a few in Metropolis it's still a little bit up in the air because uh we're still finalizing our ethereum Improvement protocols around what we're going to complete but uh some of what's going to happen there is the ability for uh smart contracts to be their own so right now we have user accounts and we have Smart contracts and user accounts are people contracts like they can't actually have their own code on there but we're going to combine it so that everything is just a contract even like user accounts or contracts so in doing that you have better uh execution to uh send a transaction and the contract take it and say oh I already have ether in my contract account so I can just provide the transaction fee and send it along whereas before as a user I had to be like is this going to be enough you know ether or gas I'm sending to execute the transaction I'm not sure uh right now if you send if you you know talk to a contract and you don't put enough uh gas in which is our basically our word for what runs the system it's an abstraction of transaction cost if you don't put enough gas in it could just fail and it'll just do an out of gas error and return to you that's going to help prevent those a lot more oh microphone right there that's Serenity but it's um going to be optional of course uh it's not we're not changing how we're doing our normal ethereum management I'm more uh talking about the ability to take ethereum's core codebase and Implement those kind of things easier there's going to be more um cryptographic things uh cryptographic pre-compiled behind the scenes that would enable types of transactions like that yep so uh I think that's all my time thank you all so much for listening to me and check out a lot of the ethereum workshops we have going on we have deep Dives a lot of cool people here uh interacting thank you