The 23-year-old creator of the world's second most valuable blockchain outlined a new vision for the network at a conference on Wednesday.
What do you do after you’ve created a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency?
A skinny, 23-year-old hacker in a green “Doge” t-shirt gave us an answer today. At ethereum’s flagship conference, Devcon, project creator Vitalik Buterin revealed he has been quietly working on a new long-term plan for the future of the blockchain network. What he called a “modest proposal,” is perhaps better described as a three-to-four-year roadmap for ethereum’s technical development.
Notably at the heart of the vision is a long-in-the-making technical change to ethereum called “sharding,” and while always expected to be included in the protocol’s plans, today Buterin proposed what might be his most solidified strategy for the technique to date.
As such, the roadmap hints at problems yet to be solved on the platform, and puts the emphasis on scalability for project developers. As ethereum nodes need to store everything that ever happened on the network, Buterin stressed that there’s a need for solutions that mitigate expensive storage costs that could escalate exponentially as the system expands.
It’s a topic that’s long been top-of-mind for the developer, as Buterin recently released new research into alleviating this problem.
Still, the talk was evidence of his emphasis on finding solutions, and of his efforts to galvanize ethereum developers more broadly to be thinking about the effort.
“The amount of activity on the blockchain is orders of magnitude larger than it was just a couple of years ago,” he said, pointing to daily transaction rates and the more than 20,000 nodes now part of the network.
With this, he suggested ethereum is running up against its limits.
Buterin told the crowd:
“Scalability is probably problem number one […] There’s a graveyard of systems that claim to solve the scalability problem but don’t. It’s a very significant and hard challenge. These are just known facts.”
High-level details
And Buterin believes sharding is the “likely” solution to this problem.
A way of partitioning data into subsets that takes its inspiration from traditional databases, the idea is that each node will only have to store a small chunk of the total network. Yet, the vision is that the underlying math would hold the system accountable, and if they need it, nodes could rely on other nodes for data.
How to execute on this in practice, and securely – without nodes sending other nodes false information – is another question that researchers have been looking into.
But Buterin is proposing a new type of sharding infrastructure that would solve both scalability and governance – ensuring the eventual system is well maintained and that it stays in check.
The proposal revealed today is for ethereum to be split into different types of shards. There will be the main shard, which would comprise today’s ethereum network; then there would be other shards, which Buterin calls other “universes.”
Crucially, though, Buterin believes the partitioning would allow for more aggressive changes on the smaller shards, and more cautious changes on the main blockchain. That way, ethereum still has platform stability, while developers still have room to test new changes and to experiment and move fast on the other shards.
Or as Buterin put it:
“Other universes where all this stuff we’ve been working on these last few years can be rolled out much much faster.”
Looking forward
Buterin’s roadmap includes other changes too, though they were less prominent in his talk.
These included planned upgrades to the ethereum virtual machine (EVM), the technology that today compiles smart contract code and communicates it to the network. He also addressed another long-in-the-making tech project, eWASM, for running ethereum in a web browser, one that hints at the necessity of ensuring this system given that the EVM has been implemented in other blockchain projects as well.
Another idea proposed was for so-called “stateless clients,” a proposal for how clients could sync with the network more quickly.
“You’ll be hearing about this idea more and more,” he said. He invited developers to contribute to the effort, much of the research of which is housed on GitHub.
But, all in all, sharding looks to be the biggest change over the next three to four years, and Buterin ended by adding there’s already developer work going on in these exploratory areas.
Notably, he hinted work might be further along than widely thought.
Buterin concluded:
“Basically we’re just inches away from a proof of concept in python.”
Dutch nursing home offers rent-free housing to students
A nursing home in the Netherlands allows university students to live rent-free alongside the elderly residents, as part of a project aimed at warding off the negative effects of aging.
In exchange for small, rent-free apartments, the Humanitas retirement home in Deventer, Netherlands, requires students to spend at least 30 hours per month acting as “good neighbors,” Humanitas head Gea Sijpkes said in an email to PBS NewsHour.
FPV Racing drone racing star wars style Pod racing are back!
This is a pre event that happend in france, organized by airgonay, a quadcopter racing fanatic association. Drones are not only for spying or doing the headlines when they fall in the streets.
Believe in your fucking self.
Stay up all fucking night.
Work outside your fucking habits.
Know when to fucking speak up.
Fucking collaborate.
Don’t fucking procrastinate.
Get over your fucking self.
Keep fucking learning.
Form follows fucking function.
A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad ideas.
Find fucking inspiration everywhere.
Fucking network.
Educate your fucking client.
Trust your fucking gut.
Ask for fucking help.
Make it fucking sustainable.
Question fucking everything.
Have a fucking concept.
Learn to take some fucking criticism.
Make me fucking care.
Use fucking spell check.
Do your fucking research.
Sketch more fucking ideas.
The problem contains the fucking solution.
Think about all the fucking possibilities.
- Brian Buirge and Jason Bacher, creators of Good Fucking Design Advice (via stoweboyd)
Losing a parent at just six years of age is unimaginable. You may vaguely remember some of the wonderful memories from that brief time spent together, but the pain surely never goes away. I imagine you cling to those memories dearly, grasping hold of them and praying that over time you won't forget. For one teenage YouTube commenter (00WARTHERAPY00) that scenario is real. And in the comments section of a piece about whether video games can be a spiritual experience, he told his story:
After IBM Deal With Twitter, Watson Supercomputer Can Mine Mountains of Tweets
It’s part of a deal the two companies announced on Wednesday that’s designed to let IBM’s business clients mine the 500 million daily Twitter messages for competitive intel.
That means IBM customers will now be able to ask Watson questions about what’s going on in the Twitterverse. The idea is to make money from corporations looking for a deeper analysis of Twitter trends—analysis that, with the brain power of Watson, IBM, and Twitter see as going far beyond understanding, say, whether or not a new running shoe is popular. According to Twitter vice president Chris Moody, a deep fryer maker, for example, could analyze tweets about soggy french fries to learn about problems with its new line of products.
This awesome Jason Silva video will change the way you thing about the Internet of Things. Not.
Jason Silva is the king of youtube hyperbole. Hence, do yourself a favor. Skip the video and read the source of the intro quote: Natural Born Cyborgs? from Andy Clark (2000):
My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I don’t even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes). But I am slowly becoming more and more a Cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery or bodily alterations, we shall be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable…just fill in your favorite fictional Cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.
Btw. what happend to Celebrity Death Match? I nominate Jason “Rattle” Silva and Bruce “Struggle” Sterling for the futurists episode. I’ll definitely put all my cryptocoins on the wolf in the living room.
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