let's talk about the future of etherium
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hi there it's Jackson thanks for
watching and welcome back to another
episode I've been getting a few requests
for this so today I'm gonna talk about
aetherium and its future what does the
roadmap look like for the next one two
three or five years but before we dive
into that if you do like these videos
make sure you hit that subscribe button
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I'm Jackson where you can become a
patron and get access to all sorts of
exclusive perks like early access to
these videos but the topic of the day is
aetherium so let's dive right in 2017 as
most people know was a massive year for
aetherium it was the year that really
put a theorem on the map not only
because of its exponentially increasing
price but also just usage through smart
contracts being leveraged for the ICO
but it's really only early days for
aetherium icos and kind of digital
assets still remain it's one primary use
case right now and we haven't seen
mainstream adoption just yet but thanks
to the prevalence of thousands and
thousands of these ICO smart contracts
and tokens that are operating on top of
the etherium main net the etherium
network is now processing over half a
million transactions per day for
comparison's sake if you look at
something like Bitcoin it's currently
only processing around 50,000
transactions per day on its network so
that's pretty crazy if you think about
it a theorem is powering around 10 times
the amount of transactions of the
Bitcoin network it's pretty busy but as
a theory I'm started to grow it wasn't
without its growing pains people started
to see some slowdowns in the network
congestion and increasing gas costs
making it cost upwards of $2 just to
send a token to somebody in parallel to
this concerns are being raised about its
use of proof-of-work as a mining
algorithm and how wasteful that is in
terms of electricity as we face climate
change and lastly the security of the
whole protocol was just thrown into
question with a multitude of smart
contract hacks occurring resulting in
the loss of hundreds of millions of
dollars so a theorem has a long way to
go but they do have a roadmap to address
some of these concerns and that's what
I'm gonna cover today if there is
interesting in comparison to something
like Bitcoin core in that the etherium
team aren't shy about making huge
changes to the underlying protocol if it
means scalability or the addition of
much-needed features as such in the past
new releases of a theorem have actually
been hard folks of the entire network
there
two upcoming releases that will follow
the same kind of pattern the first being
called Constantinople and the second
being called serenity and some of the
features or changes I'll be talking
today will work their way into those
releases but we don't have a lot of
clarity yeah that's still to be seen so
the first thing that a lot of people are
talking about when it comes to the
etherium roadmap is something called
Casper as I alluded to earlier aetherium
relies on proof-of-work for consensus
this is exactly the same as Bitcoin in
that you have a bunch of people with a
lot of computing power pointing that
computing power at the network making it
costly if they wanted to try and be a
bad actor but the etherium team
including vitalic the creator himself is
very aware of how wasteful proof of work
is proof of work burns a lot of
electricity because it's this constant
arms race to get more electricity and
more hardware trying to mine the stuff
and start from the very beginning
vitalic and the team were very clear
that at some point in the future a
theorem would need to migrate to a proof
of stake based system now I recommend
you go back and watch my video about
proof of work versus proof of stake as I
said in that video proof of stake really
hasn't been nailed in a way that doesn't
introduce some severe points of
centralization and sort of a certain
degree that's what drove the initial use
of proof of work in aetherium as the
proof of stake just wasn't there yet
Casper is simply the name of aetherium
--za proach to solving the proof of
stake problem so there's actually two
types of Casper implementation that have
been outlined the first is called FFG or
friendly finality gadget and the second
is called cbc or correct by construction
the first being proposed by vitalic
himself and the second by a researcher
called flat Zamfir by telex proposal for
Casper which is FFG is essentially a
proof-of-work proof of stake hybrid
solution so it's not a purely proof of
stake play and this is kind of the first
stage of Casper and that it's meant to
wean people away from proof of work
mining it's acronym stands for friendly
finality gadget because while there's
still proof of work mining going on for
every block every 50 blocks as a proof
of stake of voting quorum that basically
writes in a check point to history so
FFG still has just regular proof of work
but every 50 blocks there's a proof of
stake voting mechanism and when they
write this check point they're basically
voting on something which is finality is
something that is a historical
representation of history that can't be
changed this kind of hybrid middle
ground that we'll have for a little
while in aetherium is already running on
a test net and I anticipate that we
might actually see it coming on the
Net later in 2018 is part of the
Constantinople for I believe
Constantinople is scheduled for
somewhere around summer in the US or
maybe a little bit later if FFG just
isn't ready by then and we don't see it
in Constantinople it'll likely get
pushed out to the Serenity fork which we
don't currently really have a timeline
on I'd imagine it's very late 2018 if
not early 2019 but again FFG is just
that initial phase to try and win people
and move people away from proof-of-work
mining as a reliance for consensus ii
and full approach being researched is c
bc or correct by construction this is
still fairly deep in the research stage
and it's far from really being
implemented in a workable way it has a
long way to go because c bc isn't just
simply layering on proof of stake it
really kind of rethinks the whole way
the consensus protocol operates as such
I don't think we'll see it in 2018
probably 2019 if that there is a chance
that if FFG gets rolled out successfully
they could tweak the parameters of that
and just keep iterating on the FFG model
until the CBC approach is really nailed
because CBC essentially changes the
whole way consensus works in the
protocol it's not a change that they
want to implement lightly and so I don't
think we're just gonna see it rolled out
on a whim or quickly Casper's
implementation of proof of stake is just
like other proof of state consensus
protocols in that it does require
two-thirds of the validators to agree to
come to consensus to avoid what's being
dubbed a 33 percent attack though Kasper
introduces essentially a deposit that
people that are staking have to put down
and if they act badly then they lose
that deposit entirely because of this is
a pretty strong financial disincentive
for anybody to become a bad actor
because of the security deposit being
required in order to mitigate that
attack I do anticipate that it'll cost
quite a lot to be a proof of stake
validator on an FFG system early on
we're talking probably hundreds if not a
thousand aetherium just to become a
stake I totally understand that because
the incentives need to be aligned it
needs to be really expensive to try and
attack the network but it's gonna be
really interesting to see how many
people actually use proof of stake and
want to become a validator in addition
to laying down that money proof mistake
validators always have to be connected
to the network as well so it'll be
interesting just to see the adoption of
that it's really important to note that
Casper and proof of stake isn't being
positioned as a scaling initiative it's
really just a promise they've made since
the very beginning and something they've
been saying they wanted to do to get rid
of wasteful proof-of-work mining there
are some implications in the way that it
can make scaling easier in the future
because you're not relying on miners
which can often become centralized but I
feel like this is common misconception
that Casper
somehow gonna equal magic aetherium
scaling and that's simply not the case
so just wrapping up Casper and proof of
stake keep an eye out for the hybrid
implementation in mid to late 2018 and
the full implementation CBC in my
opinion will probably come in 2019 if
not later
and speaking of scalability let's move
on and dive into that I've talked about
this a fair bit on this channel but
ultimately there is no real simple
silver bullet solution to scaling
historically when people have tried to
scale these decentralized solutions
they've always introduced some point of
centralization as a compromise so you
can look at something like super or
masternodes or delegated proof of stake
it's all historically resulted in
delegating or giving the responsibility
and voting power back to a smaller group
of people so it can scale more so that's
been a big point of contention and a
hard problem to solve for everybody in
this space is how do you scale this
stuff without is making it centralised
again and some people will say there's a
threshold where there's acceptable
centralization like something like
delegated proof of stake but other than
I think this is the way that aetherium
and vitalic think that no we don't want
to have trusted individuals or entities
out there we want to maintain a
decentralized network but try and
achieve scaling through smart
technologies and new solutions more
recently people have moved to a
narrative where second layer solutions
are gonna be the thing that helps us
scale these second layer protocols and
things like plasma the state channels
which I'll have to do a video on in the
future it's been asked for a lot or
something like the Lightning Network for
payment channels or Braeden which does
that on aetherium these are great
innovative solutions I think there's two
problems with them first I think the use
cases are limited because there's a
certain type of payment relationship
that has to exist in these second layer
protocols but outside of this all of
these second layer protocols still rely
on the main chain for finality so if you
want to close out a payment channel and
move your Bitcoin to someone else in
Bitcoin you still have to do that on the
main chain you're reliant on that main
chain and its scalability and its costs
the good news with second layer
solutions like plasma and Radin and all
of these technologies is that they
aren't really pegged to the etherium
roadmap so they can release at their own
leisure there's a lot of work being done
on things like plasma I don't think
we'll see more than an alpha
implementation of that in 2018 because
it's such a new cutting-edge technology
we'll probably see something that's
actually working on main net sometime in
2019 just be clear I'm sure that people
experiment with stuff on main net in
2018 but I don't think it'll be
production-ready or easily accessible to
non developer users but again that
doesn't get at the root of the problem
how do we solve scaling on the mange
and something called sharding is vital
excurrent proposal for how we do that
essentially what sharding does is it
breaks the network into hundreds if not
thousands of mini block chains and
they're all independent but the cool
thing about these block chains is that
they inherit the same security model and
consensus so you're not having to worry
about independent consensus on every
single mini block chain these sub block
chains can scale better because they
exist for a specific purpose you're not
trying to do thousands and thousands of
different things on the one main chain
like we're currently doing with
aetherium smart contracts other people
have already thought about this kind of
mini blockchain proposal and essentially
having a network of these block chains
or participating in the same consensus
i've talked about some of these before
in my cross chain protocols video which
i recommend you go and watch but some
examples are polka dot or the cosmos
network if italic wants to implement
this natively in aetherium and i
recommend you go and watch this video
from the beyond block conference in
taipei where he basically outlined his
proposal this is all very new and a
three to five year plan that vitalic is
laying out here so I don't think we'll
even see an alpha implementation of it
in 2018 we'll probably see more written
specs and research into the idea of
sharding but I don't think we'll see an
implementation that anybody can touch
until sometime in 2019
as for what Fork that'll eventually end
up in who knows it'll be sometime far in
the future probably post the Serenity
fork
so that's consensus and scaling I think
there's some cutting edge cool
technology that's gonna solve these
problems but it's still a little ways
out I think the first we'll see is
Kasper FFG sometime in 2018 mid to late
2018 most likely but in addition to
consensus and scalability there are some
other concerns that people had and
people are working on cool solutions to
those first I want to bring up is
privacy and aetherium operates a lot
like Bitcoin today and that everything
is open and transparent and you can see
what everybody else is doing some people
don't like this and this is why they use
coins such as Z cash or manera go on
watch my privacy coin video if you
haven't already the good news for
privacy on a theorem is that most of the
legwork is actually being done it was a
hard fork back in 2017 which introduced
CK snarks so you can use that in smart
contracts CK stocks or zero knowledge
proof or a technology that are used in Z
cash to implement its privacy layer and
so all the fundamentals are actually
already in aetherium somebody just has
to start writing smart contracts which
leverage this in a smart way and I
haven't really seen an implementation of
a token or anything that's utilizing
this technology to its fullest just yet
I would anticipate in 2018 we're gonna
see some people start leveraging the
fact that ZK stocks can be used in smart
contracts and we'll see some more
privacy
focused initiatives on top of the
theorem but this will be second layer it
won't be built into aetherium natively
the second concern that a lot of people
have had is just security concerns
around aetherium smart contracts due to
bugs and smart contract code in 2017 we
saw hundreds of millions of dollars be
stolen by exploit is one of the most
notable examples of this was the parody
wallet hack that happened where
everybody that was using the
out-of-the-box multi-sig wallet the
parody basically lost their money this
included a lot of those icos who raised
millions and millions of dollars so
there's a lot of angry people the good
news is there are several initiatives
focusing on how we solve that first
there is actually an attempt to bring a
better programming language to smart
contracts right now that a factor
language for writing etherium smart
contracts is something called solidity
and while it's relatively easy for new
developers to pick up it leaves a lot of
room for these developers to make
mistakes which makes this mock contract
vulnerable is a new smart contract
language being developed called VIPRE
which is an alternative to solidity and
it has a lot more security features
limiting down the methods you can
actually access basically making it
harder for developers to unknowingly
include exploits in their code it's
actually an alpha right now and you can
go and use it that just doesn't seem to
be a lot of people using it right now
but it is being actively developed and
the second approach to smart contract
security and this is kind of the Holy
Grail is something called formal
verification I spoke about formal
verification in the past in my what is a
smart contract video when I was talking
about tezo's they're doing something
similar with formally verifiable smart
contracts and code be formally
verifiable means that code can
essentially be proven mathematically to
do what it says on the box so without
having to run that code yourself and
hunt for exploits basically you can
prove mathematically that the code just
does what it says to use formal
verification though you usually have to
adhere to a very strict syntax in the
way you write your smart contracts which
can be good because it encourages best
practices but you also often have to use
a separate coding language altogether
that is formally verifiable itself
there's a lot of research going into
this but it is cutting edge so I don't
expect we're gonna see a lot of movement
in this in 2018 but it's something to
keep an eye on it's the way I think that
all smart contracts and all code in the
future is gonna be written as well so
that you can verify that something does
what it says it does without having to
go hunt for bugs again the cool thing
about the two things that I just
mentioned is that they can be
implemented completely independently of
the etherium roadmap and any changes to
your theorem protocol itself so if you
combine all the things I've talked about
today that's actually quite a lot of
movement happening on the etherium front
so that's my roundup of the etherium
roadmap what's happening with the
protocol itself in the court
but also with the secondary layer stuff
and the tooling around it I think 2017
really set aetherium
up so that all the eyes are on its
development and now it's really up to
the development community behind
aetherium basically take it forward and
prove that it can scale in a secure way
so what do you think does the future of
aetherium look bright let me know in the
comments and also let me know if there
was anything that I've missed that's on
the roadmap that you're really excited
about if you found this video useful
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until next time I'll see you later
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you
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