ETH 2.0 goes all 4-stage on everyone
ETH made an open source code
ETH made a network happen
ETH stopped letting you steal ETH ('cuz that's bad)
ETH made smart contracts and got all snarky
People make tokens on ETH
ETH got a little smarter, a little faster, a little cheaper, and made it so people would get paid less to mine it, so it will also get more valuable.
Now, we're doing 4 stages of 2.0
This is all about scale- 'nuff said.
With the ETH brand of blockchain, everyone runs a node; meaning they run the ETH program on their mining computer and all of those anonymous node-computer geeks (itsa compliment yo) process every single ETH transaction. This is good for safety and proof, but it is bad for scale. If you could just add more geeks to scale, all would be fine, because you have to pay for pizza and pot somehow, and that would mean more nodes. But, what is really needed is more efficiency.
So, SK-SnarkySnarks releases a new album called Sharding, and none of that is how this works.
Sharding actually means ETH is gonna do some stuff that is a lot like what Bitcoin is experimenting with. It allows what a lot of people call layer-two solutions, and no I'm not going to go deep-dive on this stuff, because there are a gazillion people already doing that, and Gordon don't play dat way, homey.
Layer-two solutions, short version, means doing things off-chain that really need to happen on-chain. If your 'chain (blockchain for cool people) can't go faster, then you can send smart contracts out to other chains that CAN go faster, and let them take the responsibility for validating ETH stuff, and they'll get around to telling the ETH 'chain what it needs to know. That's pretty much what Sharding does. It sounds complicated. It IS complicated. WIGGABSC? Made my own acronym. $0 goes to the first person who can guess the right acronym in the comments below!
The next part of ETH 2.0 is (not) called the tree-hugger portion of ETH. Also known as the 'thorn-in-side-of-normal-people' issues to address with ETH, tree hugger 2.0 deals with the issues of su...sus... oh I can't make myself say it... sustainability. But, I still really like Vitalik anyway.
Truthfully, delivering pizza in bio-degradable boxes to ETH mining geeks would probably save the environment more than anything else, but they've gotta be all, like, you can't code that, dude! So, now, embodiment of the 60's protesters that they are, they have to get out of the stone age of POW-MIA (okay, since millennials no longer learn about... wars, that means prisoners of war, missing in action, and it is what hippies complained about during the Vietnam war). What I meant to say was, ETH is POW, meaning proof of work (not pizza on workstation). This deals with the network, nodes, and hash. That means geeks with computers running ETH code, sending their results back to the ETH-central to process... kinda. You have to go looking for the connections, find the processes to process, and get the processing right. That takes time, computer processing, and electricity, and for every $.01 (penny for dummies) of ETH mined and earned, a tree hugger dies a small death. OK, fine, I see the point. I still think less cardboard and fewer stamps on pot sent via express mail would save a lot more... planet, but sure fix the code, see if I care (I do... some).
Vitalik, being smart, actually did really well with the POW thing. It is actually fast. It is actually cheap. But, like all things cheap and fast, haste makes waste. The real issue is all the processing that DOESN'T count. Once someone processes the thing needed, all of those other computers that had to do the same thing, didn't result in anything. Redundancy is necessary, but in the end, it is also a waste of resources, and the United Nations hates that kinda thing, so fix it or else!
Up until now, the solution for ETH, Bitcoin, and probably everything else, has been to make better, faster, cheaper geek tractors, which I hear some also call them computers or gpu's (the processing part of this stuff). To mine more ETH, you need more computers with faster parts and that costs more money, so it gets faster and cheaper to process but more expensive to upgrade, and all this stuff just cramps my style, man. Not groovy.
In walks the TV Infomercial part of this telenovela: "there has to be a better wayyyyy!" And there is... or may be. POW is proof of work. Everybody knows that (now). POS is piece of shilling... part of something... please offer steak... argh what is it? Oh yeah; Proof of Stake. That's where all of this is heading.
Proof of stake is probably one of the most important things Vitalik is working on, and it means the biggest difference for the whole ETH ecosystem. You can't please all hippies, geeks or tree huggers, but you can improve scale, efficiency, privacy, safety, and su...sus... darnit you're making me type it again?... sustainability, and that's what ETH is doing.
We're going to get into a little more detail and then talk about all of the other smaller... still important things that 2.0 represents, and finally we'll talk about where things stand right now, because a lot of this stuff JUST happened and ETH still exists, so they didn't blow it up yet.
Read the next part now... it's what you are doing, and that makes pizza places happy, and if pizza is happy, then so am I.
Gordon Freeman on to the next one.
