Where is it from
The development of the is a very well-planned task. Before was rolled out, core developers and project managers had already foreseen some possible challenges and improvements it would take in the future and created a road map to improve the efficiency of the . After the previous Constantinople upgrade and the upcoming Istanbul upgrade, is moving towards the next generation of 2.0.
What is it for
The spotlight of the Istanbul upgrade is on the implement of ProgPoW algorithm.
The ultimate goal of is to become a decentralized global network supported by thousands of nodes. However, the existing Proof-of-work (PoW) consensus model, which was made famous by , has been found heavily energy-inefficient and prone to the 51% attack. As such, there have been voices over the years urging for migration of PoW to Proof-of-stake (PoS) model. Instead of racing on expensive ASIC miners for higher hash rate and power in a PoW model, a PoS algorithm chooses the creator (or validator) of a new block in a deterministic way, depending on his wealth (i.e. the stake).
Many recent reports indicate that hash rate and power has become concentrated in fewer hands, like the giant Bitmain, putting ’s decentralization and security at risk. By weighing much less on computing power, the PoS consensus is said to be fairer for general miners and more environmentally sustainable.
But the migration takes time. Therefore, the ProgPoW was introduced as a transitional measure to narrow the efficiency gap.
It is also noteworthy that the Istanbul upgrade is the final hard fork before steps into the Serenity (aka 2.0) phase.
What changes will it bring
As described on ’s , ProgPoW is launched to “close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs.” To balance all miners’ opportunity to mine ETH, the ProgPoW algorithm is “pre-tuned for the most common hardware utilized” on the .
After the Istanbul upgrade is rolled out, it is expected that the efficiency advantage of ASIC miners over GPU miners will decrease from 2x to 1.2x. In other words, ASIC miners will have less control of the network and GPU miners can benefit more.
In addition, ’s core devs will start working on the implementation of Serenity and PoS after Istanbul.
When will it take place
Here is a timeline of the important events regarding the Istanbul upgrade:
- Apr 2019: On 17th, a CoreDev meeting will be held in Berlin to discuss the Istanbul upgrade
- May 2019: All new proposals for the Istanbul upgrade must be submitted for review
- Jul 2019: 19th is the approximate soft deadline for major client implementations to test Istanbul’s compatibility
- Aug 2019: A testnet upgrade will be launched on Ropsten, Gorli, or ad-hoc testnet
- Oct 2019: The Istanbul hard fork will roll out if no technical issues are found
Published at Sat, 23 Mar 2019 03:14:34 +0000
