Well i am sorry, this article is a bit long, i tried to get rid of anything that is not important. I will be talking about two main things, why is Metropolis coming in following months and what changes it will bring. Before i start, i want to recommend you to have your eth tokens in your wallet, not on the exchange, even though the update should not result in a split chain.
Ethereum is currently a Proof of Work cryptocurrency. In order to ensure the system is scalable and decentralized, Ethereum plans to move to a Proof of Stake protocol where a lot less computational power is required. The transition from PoW to PoS will not be included in the Metropolis update yet. As you can see in the table below, it has been already more than a year since Homestead release, Metropolis is coming.
Olympic................... May, 2015
Frontier................... 30 July 2015
Homestead............. 14 March 2016
Metropolis.............. coming soon
According to www.ethnews.com Vitalik Buterin mentioned that the recent Ether price increase has affected Ethereum’s impending Ice Age. The Ethereum Ice Age refers to the exponential slowing of the network as the difficulty bomb begins to make mining harder. This is all about the eventual switch to a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. What’s interesting is how an increase in mining power pushes the Ice Age further back.
Vitalik concluded that “by the end of June, the block time is only going to be around 19.5 seconds; by the end of August it’s only going to be about 28.5 seconds.” Those are lower than previous estimates, which saw block times reaching over 32 seconds by the end of August. While only a difference of a few seconds, the deviation is significant and was brought about by the recent run-up in the price of Ether.
Because of the math behind the difficulty bomb, as the network’s mining power increases, the time when the difficulty bomb’s effects become apparent is pushed back. As the price of Ether climbs, more miners join the network, since their effort reaps that much more reward. Buterin and the core developers have been thinking about adjusting timelines for Ethereum’s Metropolis release. Buterin said:
“Basically, if we get it out before the end of June it’s even better, and if we get it out before the end of August that’s still, like, less bad. My recommendation is probably still end of June as a … normal case target and end of August as a worst case deadline.” He went on to say, “It basically looks like the practical thing to do, I think, is to just like keep our heads down and see if we can finish this by the end of June.”
As you can see on this graph from etherscan.io we are just starting to experience the ice age, the blocktimes are slowly increasing.
So what will be the major updates in Metropolis?
It has been coming for quite some time, but Ethereum will receive more transaction privacy features. In the first phase, the Metropolis hard fork will introduce the building blocks for zk-SNARKS, which is used in coins like ZCash, ZenCash and ZClassic.That being said, introduced the building blocks for zero-knowledge SNARKS is a big step for Ethereum. It will allow for better privacy, and even anonymity whenever needed.
Another updat is account abstraction. Account abstraction allows users to “define” their wallet address – of which they own the private key – in the form of a smart contract. This change means private keys used to control an external account would be less susceptible to attacks executed by quantum computers against the signature scheme being used right now. Other than the security changes, account abstraction also allows for contracts to pay for gas. This creates a possibility to create contracts which would be free to execute by the user.
There will be ofcourse more other changes, but these two are the most important from the user perspective. Metropolis is an update that brings many new features for the developers, it enhances the security and changes the implementation of several already functioning parts in a better and more efficient way. I am so excited for this change and i expect another Ethereum prices surge after that. Thank you very much for reading, i am sorry for too much text.
sources:
ethnews.com
themerkle.com
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