The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin released the whitepaper that indicated the creation of a blockchain that would support application development without being tied to a single specific scripting language. Nevertheless, the Ethereum blockchain platform ‘mirrored’ the proof of work algorithm used by its predecessor, Bitcoin.

Ethereum has been considering leaving the energy-intensive Proof of Work algorithm and tuning to proof of stake algorithm to confirm the transactions. Aside from consuming less energy, by shifting to the POS algorithm, Ethereum would have a higher transactional speed and improve on its scalability.

2.0

The power of the new algorithm would be unlocked by the launch of Ethereum 2.0. In order to ensure a smooth change over, the new platform would be rolled out in phases. As per the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, the launch would start with setting bases for staking on the main chain, “providing random numbers through Beacon chain, enabling Sharding, and eventual activation of a virtual machine that would give state execution results.”

For changeovers to be done more swiftly, Ethereum researchers have been holding Ask Me Anything (AMA) session once in a while to clear contentious issues and to answer questions from the Ethereum community.

Scaling a Platform

During Buterin’s AMA session, the co-founder said, that in all honestly “that there are no unresolved research challenges at this point.” On how complex Ethereum 2.0 is compared to Ethereum 1.0 and migration. 

The Russian-Canadian programmer:

“It got considerably simpler over the last year. There’s a lot of things in ETH2 (Ethereum 2.0) that are much simpler than ETH1 (Ethereum 1.x). But there’s definitely lingering complexity, and I deeply care about mining it…The current approach is to fold ETH1 into ETH2 as an execution environment. In practice, this will mean that we would need to have a hard fork on the ETH1 side to rebalance some gas costs.”

Eric Conner, a researcher on Ethereum took to Twitter to say:

“One of the beautiful things about PoS is that these attacks can be handled with grace. The community can hard-fork out the malicious actors, so they have no more voting power. The malicious actors just burnt a lot of money to temporarily halt a network… [also] If a validator behaves provably malicious, then they are slashed by having their balance reduced…Minimum penalty is 1 ETH, but it goes up linearly.”



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