Les Amis d'Ethereum France #8.2 — "The Merge" par Jérome De Tychey

[Music] Ladies and Gentlemen of Morges, what an emotional moment! We've been waiting for so long. My name is Jérôme, I'm the founder of Comète. We 're in the Comète offices today, and I'm also the president of the French branch. It's a great pleasure to always see new faces at our Meetups, so thank you all for coming in such large numbers.

There will be a small snack after this presentation. We've brought down an arcade machine so you can play retro games and also try your hand at other games if you're interested. So, like Addenstei, we're here in July every year in Paris. For those who are discovering this kind of meetup, know that there's a highlight of the year's events, generally in Paris, which takes place in July and is organized by ETHCC in France. It's called ETHCC.

Follow the Ethereum France account or be here on Twitter for more information and to propose talks. Come and join us! We also welcome many volunteers to these events, so if you'd like to participate, don't hesitate. ETHCC in France is just a reminder that it's an association... 1901, which promises education, research, and open source on blockchains, not specifically Ethereum.

We host people like Starknet, who develop partly on Ethereum but also on their own solution. We host people from Tesos, we host people from many different blockchains because we like to understand them and we're interested in different protocols. We have a YouTube channel that's great in terms of content; there's lots to see in French, English, and all that. And that's what I realized— I made them a little in French, a little in English because I came back several times. Anyway, at Comat, we make video games that run on the channel.

We're also interested in Rowlop. We do cool stuff. If you'd like to discover a little bit about what we do, do n't hesitate to ask us questions. Today I'm mainly going to talk to you about Murdge. We have a game in public beta with over 500,000 games played now and lots of really cool partners.

So today, the much... So, once again, while making these slides I realized there was a lot, a lot, a lot to say, so I'll perhaps offer you an overview of what's happened, what we've done, where we are, where we're going. You potentially have some very burning questions, like whether there will be a strong, US-based, very jury-compliant approach, things like that. Well, I'm not going to touch on that personally; I don't think so at all, quite the opposite. But if you have any questions, I'll try to get to the conclusion fairly quickly to give you the opportunity to ask them.

So, the prologue: where we come from. In 2008, we have Augy Lakamoto publishing Bitcoin, then the Electronic Cash System, and from there, everything took off. We discovered blockchains, the world discovered blockchains. With that, I'll give you several key dates: in 2009, the implementation of Bitcoin; in May 2010, we have Pizza Day, the first transaction for a real-world good—someone buys pizzas with Bitcoin. And then it's a bit...

The regulation of cryptocurrencies, which is controversial, means that yes, in fact, you can use cryptocurrency to buy drugs on the Dark Web. We also opened Crowd, which opened in February 2011, and then there was the closure of Circrose in December and October 2013. So you see, we were talking about lawyers' time, and recently it also happened in 2013, and I have things that are closed, that's how it is. And especially in December 2013, we invited Butterine, who publish the White Pepper for Earthlings. It would have been a shame if we hadn't gotten used to reading it.

In fact, there's so much content, so many things to do, and then we can directly try a net test or something else. We've kind of lost the habit of going to look at the White Paper for Earthlings, so this is an opportunity, with Birds coming out, to delve back into the White Paper for Terrariums and also its French translation, which has been Made by members of the 7th (former name of the lands of France), so, well, I'll say it now. When you look at the details, you're faced with a blockchain. That is to say, you find the three more or less constituent elements of a blockchain: there's a network, a network of nodes that replicate the same ledger, and then there's a unit of account, the lands. And the particularity of terrariums is that you also have a virtual machine, the VM.

Okay, speaking quickly from earlier, this VM is a bit like, well, it 's not very fast, it's not crazy. You can run a lot of programs on it, but you're quite quickly limited in terms of what you can execute on it because there's a payment system at Yogo. You pay for each execution, which is the gas. And today we have solutions to execute complicated things, for example, checking, as well as Snark. We have comparative loans, we also have implementations to allow doing this in the VM, but it still limits things when you take Looking back, we have a blockchain that replicates the functioning of a computer thanks to this VM and this franchise.

If we ever do the Avengers, you'll see on the left quite a few chains that use a VM to varying degrees, in the middle chains that use almost a VM, and on the right chains that have chosen a different approach to the virtual machine. But normally today, the VM is pretty much the foundation. So if you start by using Smart Contracts with Solidetti, you're compatible with tons of different chains. Plus, most roll-ups and other DL2 solutions, whether optimistic or ticket-based, have some links between the two. So it's a good way to start with Smart Contracts, and many of you have already experienced a Smart Contract, so there's no need to spend too much time on it.

Anyway, February 2014... well, a little MT-Gox hack for those who remember: it seems that Bitcoin will soon be sold, then in 2014 to finance the network's development, and on July 30th we... I had the Mind of Ethereum go live, and in the White Paper on the platforms, it says, "Well, we're doing an off-platform because that's what's currently working, and it would still be good to have everyone benefit, but we're not super satisfied with the state of the consensus algorithms. We could do better. Let's develop a good consensus algorithm and we'll put it in Ethereum when it's ready."

So in 2015, we said, "Well, we'll get there, we'll go live with it one of these days, and preferably quickly rather than too long." Then there were quite a few problems. It really was a bit of a victim of its own success. There was a lot of activity on the channel in 2016. There were many events, notably the DAO.

If you want to reread what happened during those highs and lows, and find content in French on the internet in France, I invite you to watch it. And even right after, there's a big conference, Decon, in Shanghai. There was also a network attack because the virtual machine's hop codes were incorrectly pressed, so many events, so many distractions for the protocol developers. A little flashback to the DAO, go read it, it's part of this network's history, part of blockchain history, especially since we're talking about compliance right now. And the US Securities and Exchange Commission said after the DAO, in fact, for us, it was practically a security measure, it was practically something that came into our hands, so be careful.

The Shanghai attack was also a big event since 80% of the network crashed. The network didn't stop, but 80% crashing is still significant, and it often prompts reactions from other chains who say, " Yeah, but we know, we crashed too, it's not a big deal." And you're really right, they crashed despite the attack. And when you look at how the network reacted during the crash, it's quite impressive too. And precisely, when you look at the history, you can see...

Territory is a way of looking at it, a bit like if you were studying the geology of the Earth, you would make a cross-section, you have to look at the different layers. Well, to keep track of the terrarium's history, you can look at the gas price, the gas limit, which is how many executions you put in each block. So the more the uterus grows, the rarer it becomes, the more mature it is, the more space you have in those blocks. And you have all the important forces. So, Homstad first, who really said OK, the network is heavy enough, we can start putting things inside.

You have the DAO attack, you have the bone attack I was talking about, you have the great era of ICOs, you have cryptos that used the first waves of NFTs, and you have IP 159, which were important elements in the history of this network. And each time, the network adapted, the network reacted, the network tried to take the load, push back the load, or postpone it. And today, if you want to install an Ethereum node... It's possible, you need a few hundred gigabytes on your hard drive. We recommend a terabyte to store the entire chain for the coming years and to be somewhat safe.

Node developers are constantly trying to optimize how these nodes accumulate. We're building a network for the long term. Ah, I took this screenshot in April 2022, and it took up about 671 gigabytes. I don't know if that's big enough here. So, synchronizing with GET requires 671 gigabytes, or 629 if you use OpenEthereum, which writes in Rust, a bit more efficient.

That's why I went from Professor of WARC to Paufteak. So, there are many slides full of text. The presentation is recorded. If you're interested, I'll share my slides so you can read them in detail. The first time, which is still a consensus mechanism, is quite meritocratic.

That is to say, you solve a cryptographic puzzle, and you say, "Here's the person who will write the blog; it's the person who comes in first." To open this padlock, this padlock is very, very big, so we'll have to try a lot of things to open it. It's easy to verify that the padlock was open if you say, "There's the closed padlock, there's the solution." You can verify that it opens, and there's no other way to solve this mapping tutorial than to put in the work, to work on it. So this meritocratic aspect, in fact, means that we only have one thing to do to open a blog: we have to spend time on calculations.

And for many, many participants in the Blockchain Atlas community, it's an indicator that's better because everyone can participate, everyone can get involved, and running algorithms to find the solution to this puzzle consumes electricity, so it consumes energy. And energy means a link with the real world, so it's a position that means we consume energy. Obviously, compared to Professor Steak, which is a rather capitalist system, you're saying, in fact, the people who are going to do The blocks that will be randomly selected to make the next block are determined by how much they've staked, how much funds they've locked, and if you've locked 1% of the funds, you're selected once every 100 times. So, it's selected once every 100 times. To make the blog, and without taking a philosophical stance between the two, you have a trader here, anchoring yourself in energy, creating it by people who have something to lose if the network doesn't function properly.

So, for Steak, we said in 2014 that it was going to happen very quickly, and the proof is that when Ethereum, which was Rome, went mainnet a short time later, so in August 2015, there was the implementation of the bomb difficulty. The difficulty, well, it's an element of the protocol that states that from a certain date, starting with a certain block, the blocks become increasingly difficult to generate. The block difficulty increases exponentially. That is to say, the developers said, we're going to implement something that makes it so that We'll be punished because our network will be slower if we don't manage to implement Profovstech. Good idea, well, it was about setting a date for this ambitious research project.

We should have kept you busy until that date. It didn't work very well. The proof is that this disco has been regularly postponed, and the difficulty level is high. The next one is scheduled to arrive around September 11th, I think, the 10th or 11th. So we're going to feel the difficulty.

For me, the terrarium blocks will slow down before the berg, so there you go. But precisely after the binge, well, we realize, enjoy it, so there will be more difficulties. The list of different forces: there were some in October 2017, February 2019, then we had one in January 2020, there's one in July 2021, there was another one that I haven't noted here yet, and traditionally, in fact, we now only give the names to the fort on the main network, on the execution part, with large conferences, not city-wide ones. where there have been major Ethereum conferences, and regarding what's happening with Bitcoin Shane, which I'll talk about a bit later, the star names, so the last fork on Bitcoin Shane was Bellatrix, which took place on Monday, and the next one on Ethereum will be called Paris, yeah, there you go. And what's more, it's supposed to be the 14th, the 5th, Corneille, that's cool.

So, if you want to combine all of that, and you have the Casper story written by Benzem Fille, or all the articles on how it's been going on since the beginning of 2020, we have an Ethereum 2 pro-stake spec that's stabilized, and since that day we've been moving forward. We were going into a bit of detail, I think, without spending too much time on it. Actually, why did it take so long to create a good pro-stake? It's because if you're asked what a good blockchain is, what's the recipe for making a good blockchain, then you probably want to mix three things. which are n't necessarily completely compatible.

That is to say, you want as many notes as possible, you want to have many nodes available, many ways to connect to this blockchain, many ways to connect to the ledger, and you also want the blocks to arrive quickly. You want that when you make a transaction, you click on instant transfer and then, boom, there it is, you see the money arrive in your account, you see it arrive just like that, and you don't want there to be any delays. The transaction is in, the transaction is in, I know it's in, and once it's in, it's final. You want a good outcome, and then it would be even better if we could easily join this network, which already has many nodes, and if it wasn't too expensive to make a transaction, because if it costs you a lot to make a transaction, you exclude people from the network. So, we can give any definition of centralization on a blockchain; the one I like is that anyone who wants to become a validator can do so and participate in the validation.

It requires very little technical knowledge and very little commitment. In financial terms, having large hardware and all that isn't necessarily the case anymore with Bitcoin. If you want a chance of creating a Bitcoin blog, say, in the next 100 years, you still need to invest a significant amount, without any calculation involved. That is to say, you need to have your own miner, and a very powerful one at that. Being an independent miner, a slow miner, can actually cost a lot of money on a network like Bitcoin.

To be an independent validator on Ethereum, you'll have one invalidator out of 420,000. There's a blog; it took 4 seconds, yeah, but it costs you 32 ethers, which is a lot. So, we're not quite there yet, honestly, but it's a good target. That is to say, well, that's what being decentralized is all about. So, we could make larger blocks.

Anyway, when we make the blocks... [Music] Finally, the Ethereum Foundation published its design call, which has 5 points: decentralization, resilience, security, simplicity, and longevity. Normally, it should... Being able to understand how the Professor of Steak works on the Terror makes it clear that there are validators who are called upon to test, to propose, and to act. In a proper two- or three-hour presentation, you gain an understanding of the entire system and how it functions.

Having done the planting specifically on the Professor of Steak Deshereum, it actually works quite well. You can feel the rationale behind it: why use this Professor of Steak? Not simply to remove mining, but also to allow standards to scale, to allow LaTerme to have more activities that are done in parallel or within the terrariums, but which ultimately verify themselves in the field. Initially, the objective was to consider that we would have Charters, that we would have execution happening more or less directly on the Bitcoin Shane, and then to have Charters that also execute, and that we could verify and switch from one Charter to another. It turned out that we had something very useful in the ecosystem.

It 's called Reloop, which does exactly that, more or less like Chardes, and it was worth focusing on charms. So today, the Ethereum scaling roadmap is based on relaps. Today, we want to have as many roll-ups as possible that communicate with Ethereum and that, eventually, can communicate with each other or with trusted third parties that link the two, or move from their roll-up to the main chain and then to another one, which isn't easy enough. And that's now the center of the scalability map. If you're interested, you have plenty of resources on tank sharding, and I'll give you some links later.

So now that we're on the right track in 2020, we thought, well, we only have one more to implement, and so since December 1, 2020, it was rare and benefited from it in parallel, but there are those who have benefited since December 2020. Phase 0 was done, so first, the contract was filed to allow People were asked to deposit their interest in becoming a steakr, then the Genesis block was launched and has been running for almost 19 months now, and phase 1, the removal of mining and the start of scaling with relocations, is now expected on September 14th, then the 15th in a more pessimistic estimate, the 13th in the most optimistic estimate, and in my opinion... I'm aiming for around the 14th. Once we've done that, what else will there be to do? Plenty of things to improve the virtual machine, allowing for good flexibility in Reloop deployment, but also enabling good communication between these roles.

We have a complete guide to the rollers in French, which is a Vitalities article that was translated on the ground in France. Go to Sternoil Island and recently to Gratte Face, which is one of the leads on the integration of Reloop optimization on the ground. 2 has done several plantings; I've summarized them for you on this trade if you're interested. So, it's right now, right here. December 2020, we're used to looking at the first Bitcoin block, saying "Chen slow on the brick of bel out for banks."

Okay, when we look at the first Deterrium block, what do we actually find? Not much, since it was a passage from the testnet to the Mainnet, and you just have a link in the comments saying, "Ah, that was the H from the previous blog." Well, it's not great. When you look at the first blog post about Theory 2, there's a guy who was randomly chosen to make the first block. He was the validator, I don't remember the number, and his username was Mr.

Fahrenheit. Since he got an autograph from Vitality, it's possible. Here's an old screenshot of the staking. So, at the beginning of staking, you had a 15.9% reward when you staked, which is a lot.

Today you get much less. The principle is that the more people stake, the fewer DTRs are distributed on average to everyone, so your reward decreases. Then, when there are fewer validators, the network adapts and distributes more to attract more validators. So, at launch, 971,000 R were staked on the network for Rome 2, and today you have 14 million, which is 14 times more. In 18 months, 14 times more land has been stored.

422,000 validators And today, validators are paid 4.1% for their validation actions. So it's not staking like, "We delegate, we see them, take my land, figure it out yourselves." No, you stake 32, then you deploy your node, then you do your thing, you tilt your thing, and you make sure your node isn't running 24/7 because if you're not connected, in fact, every time you lose a minute of connection time, you lose a minute of reward. So it's not like, "I stake and that's it, I leave it running and it shows up."

You still have to do maintenance. And then there's a question that comes up often: okay, there are 422,000 validators, but how many are unique? How many singles are there? Surely there aren't 422,000 people running an Ethereum node who know how the whole thing works. I tested it, and it works.

You'll probably use a neck or something. A little more, a little more Wi-Fi, a slight difficulty: you need a BLS key because Bitcoin China does n't sign with the same signature standard. That causes a few problems. We had fun when I was struggling with the integration. If you can use it for your reading, if you'reinterested, well, the next step is the best part.

We're there, that's it! We're going to delete the first time there's no more " puff work," there's no more execution consensus, there's only "prof steak" left. So the "murge" isn't the beginning of the "prof of stack," it's the end of the " prof work." It's the best of the two chains, and so on. But green, that's it!

And apparently, this narrative that we think is going to take on a huge, huge scale, and we say that, it's true, less of me, the electricity consumed, but how? You still have to know that when you deposit, you were in sticking mode. You wo n't be able to withdraw them right away. Take a little time first. We'll see how the network works, if everything is okay.

on Ethereum in full, professional steak, and after that, it doesn't pose too many problems. The priority is technically to allow withdrawals, so after that, ethers can be deposited and withdrawn. There are waiting times between deposits and withdrawals, but it should proceed correctly. So, like, how come 99.95%?

Why was I asked that question? 99.95%, where does that estimate come from? So, I suggest we do a little calculation together. If we take 925,000 gigabytes of Ethereum yesterday at 10:40 PM, you take— I forgot—an Artix 340, it develops 121 megabytes for 290 watts, and you divide all that.

That gives you roughly 7.6 million equivalent GPUs running to do some serious H-clocking. So, when there's more mining, it means there are a lot of mappings on the market. That's great news for those who do video game virtualization; you'll be able to build a super computer. And it consumes 2,2,2 gigawatts, that's a lot, it's roughly the output of the Silk Road dam, a bit like that one.

I have a similar model for my own validation, it works well, it consumes between 15 and 45. If we consider a high range, they have 90. Well, you do the math, that's 900,000 watts, or 95.99.95% less than with mining for the services it provides, that is to say, a service, a financial system with settlement, with landing, with tools and all that, an alternative to the existing system.

And who can say, "Here's how much I consume," I don't know if the existing system can say, "Here's how much I consume." Hello La Tour, it was general, etc. So, in fact, there was a checklist, it was n't just Vitalic who said, "We're mixing now, I looked, it's Saint Corneille, that suits me well, we're going to do the thing." It didn't happen like that at all, there are tests, there's something going on, all that. So, for comments like, " Well, in fact, you Go ahead and change the plane's engine mid-flight, and you're crazy?

No, we've already done it on about ten empty flights, and besides, the flight plan has been running for a year with both types of engines. We're just going to disconnect one. So there you go, it's ready, we're ready, let's go! And well, we're eager to see how it works. So, September 14th, the date was determined by a measure in the protocol that accumulated difficulty, so it could happen a little before, it could happen a little after, depending on Kimine.

If land values ​​increase, generally there are more miners because it becomes more profitable and dominant. So the more land prices accelerate relative to the dollar, the more there will potentially be, so that will bring the date closer. Today, we consider that we have four important points, Henry World, on the staking. This is without considering that we will also have rewards related to Fizz transactions, which are received by miners and which can also be optimized with techniques like Ji. A priori, we should be around 7 or 8.

So this will have quite significant impacts because many tokens are listed against land, many tokens are listed as defaulting with ether interacting somewhere. This ether yield rate will potentially have a big impact on the Defight ecosystem. [Music] And if you're interested, there are obviously considerations regarding the amount of land in circulation. Because if we don't mine, there's no land for the miners, so there are two steps per blog that aren't distributed. So today, the land supply is driven by three things: the land we liked to thank, the stickers we liked to thank the miners, and the ether we delete because there's activity.

I'm not going to tell you that making a transaction on Ethereum burns ether. So, theoretically, with an equivalent amount of activity on Ethereum, we should be between -1 and -2% in terms of supply. Well, what's left for you to do now? Relax, enjoy. We'll try to organize a tweet session to relive the experience.

Live with several people from the French ecosystem and the stringers who contributed to its implementation, we discussed Relics and are among the leaders on one of the sticking nodes called Lighthouse, which has already visited us in France, and we'll be receiving others like that who will benefit from the margin with you after the Murdge. Well, there's a lot to do, we're pretty much at this stage, there's still all this, that's it, it's really not well done, so there are still a lot of things coming to Ethereum and especially a great event next week, thank you all. [Applause] [Music]