parity VS research

Parity v1.10.1 gets out, making initial syncs way faster.

Parity v1.6.7 addresses potential usability issues with import and recovery of existing accounts.

Parity v1.7.4 ships a critical consensus-relevant fix for the upcoming Byzantium hard-fork, node operators are advised to upgrade.

Parity v1.7.3 beta enables the Byzantium fork on the Ethereum mainnet.

Parity v.1.7.2 sees the light, featuring support for the Byzantine fork, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Parity 1.6.8 gets out, addressing wrong transaction receipts on Ethereum Classic.

Vitalik teases twitter that "Sharding is coming" with the release of research code, and provides more info here

Casper Version 1 Implementation Guide sees the light.

I would definitely love for there to be more work on ZK programming languages. Exposing the internals more to help people do this was one of my motivations for attempting the task of making my own PLONK implementation. We need more tools to help people write circuits, and verify circuits; we should get to the point where verifying a verification key can be done eg. on etherscan as easily as verifying solidity code can be today.

> they have zero power to do anything related to consensus.

Suggest reading what Vitalik has to say if you're going to offer this kind of objection:

https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/papers/disc...

Infura collects upwards of 80 percent of the fees that flow into Ethereum and is in a position to control exactly who participates profitably. If your solution is "minority will fork" the obvious question is surely "with what scalable infrastructure?"

The main difference between all recent Ethereum sharding proposals since ~2020 (both Danksharding and pre-Danksharding) and most non-Ethereum sharding proposals is Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap (see also: [1] [2] [3]): instead of providing more space for transactions, Ethereum sharding provides more space for blobs of data, which the Ethereum protocol itself does not attempt to interpret. Verifying a blob simply requires checking that the blob is available - that it can be downloaded from the network. The data space in these blobs is expected to be used by layer-2 rollup protocols that support high-throughput transactions.

Vitalik Buterin gives a (not so sneak) peek at the current version of the Casper contract.

Quite surprised at this comment. The reason I got into blockchain was _because_ of the incredibly difficult technical challenges it poses. Among the few I get to work on:

- How to implement robust p2p networking algorithms for sharding in a distributed system such as Ethereum (a very deep rabbit hole), as Ethereum is migrating to a "sharded" architecture

- How to solve the "data availability problem" https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/A-note-on-data-ava.... The current solution uses advanced cryptography known as KZG commitments https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2020/06/16/kate-polynomial-...

- How to solve the problem of "transaction frontrunning", in which miners have an asymmetric advantage in ordering transactions they put in blocks for their benefit, which can adversely affect users creating those transactions. This is a problem known as MEV (Miner Extractable Value) https://research.paradigm.xyz/MEV and there is some incredibly sophisticated work going into this problem. It is a deep engineering problem as well

I could go on and probably give you 20 other incredibly technical, challenging problems that are on the bleeding-edge of this technology. If you're interested, would be happy to chat more!

Verkle trees (very important concept): slides, doc, code

All ethereum research is open source https://github.com/ethereum/research including the cryptography they plan to use for eth2. If you want an overview of what eth2 could look like take a look at the roadmap https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1333922620857745408 or the eth2 specs https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs