Ethereum Core Devs Meeting Constantinople Session #1 Agenda

[Souptacular]

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting Constantinople Session 1 Agenda

Meeting Date/Time: Friday 31 August 2018 at 14:00 UTC

Meeting Duration 1.5 hours

YouTube Live Stream Link

Constantinople Progress

Agenda

1. Three competing EIPs to delay the difficulty bomb and reduce/maintain the block reward:
   a. EIP-858 - Delay bomb and reduce block reward to 1 ETH per block.
   b. EIP-1234 - Delay bomb and reduce block reward to 2 ETH.
   c. EIP-1295 - Delay bomb, keep rewards to 3 ETH, change other factors such as POW incentive structure.
2. Constantinople EIPs
   a. EIP 145: Bitwise shifting instructions in EVM
   b. EIP 1218: Simpler blockhash refactoring. We are delaying this one until Istanbul.
   c. EIP 1014: Skinny CREATE2
   d. EIP 1052: EXTCODEHASH Opcode
   e. EIP 1283: Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps
3. Client Constantinople Updates
4. Constantinople Testing
5. (If we have time) Changing PoW algorithm to be ASIC resistant. There is renewed interest from miners to implement ProgPoW.

Different articles/links regarding potential issuance reduction conversation:

• A Case for Ethereum Block Reward Reduction to 2 ETH in Constantinople (EIP-1234)
• Reddit discussion of the above article
• Eric Conner's Updated Twitter Thread
• Coinvote (79 participants): What should be done regarding proof-of-work issuance until Casper is ready?
• FEM Forum: EIP-1234 vs EIP-1227: Constantinople Difficulty Bomb & Block reward
• Bitfly Twitter Post on Miner Opinion
• FEM Forum: Final Request From the GPU Mining Community
• EIP 1295 Presentation
• Ethereum’s Economic Breakpoint: An Analysis

[stobiewan]

The decision for the block reward shouldn't be limited to the values in the proposed EIPs. Choosing between one or two eth/block is an unnecessarily coarse resolution. 1.15 eth per block will match bitcoins inflation rate, and exceed it when uncle rewards are considered, so going all the way up to two just because it's a whole number and is one of the options above completely loses sight of the objective.

[mohsenghajar]

For a more uniform and predictable block time, a reduction of difficulty is in order, namely deferrance of the difficulty bomb.

At this point what seems urgent is a measure to support the price and prevent a further fall. Most effective way is reduction of miner rewards. The 1 eth per block sounds the most promising of the three, as it most prudently addresses the urgency at this critical time. I would prefer the issuance to be even smaller, for the same reason. Miners will be winners too. Comrades -- Ethereum can dive really really deep, and not come back for a long time if nothing is done.

Fortunately, the voters have spoken. But I believe the option of capping the supply must also come back on the table. EIP 960

[timxor]

🍿😀

[Ramarti]

Hey guys, dapp dev here. I try to follow all the calls and last one I feel it was pretty "conflicted" at least looking at the comment stream.

Do you have an establish consensus method to reach a decision? Is it a vote? will the decision on point 1 happen in the meeting or at a later point in time or in a different forum? Maybe having clear expectations on how that decision will be made could help.

Anyway just my 2 cents. Much love, keep up the work!

[justinjja]

In addition to the ProgPOW discussion,
I would also be interested in a tiny change to the current Ethash algo as a stopgap until ProgPOW can be properly tested.
The same type of thing Monero did with Cryptonight to CryptonightV1

[nico9111]

A vote on this topic was just closed and we have the result. It's a viable vote that was proposed and voted upon. What to do with it? apply it or just ignore it? If we ignore, will the community have faith in the next vote proposal? if miners say this is not representative because no ASIC resistance was introduced, does it excuse the fact that they didn't vote for their favorite EIP (I guess 1295 or 1227)? if they haven't, does that mean they lost their right to complain? questions, questions...

What's for damn sure is that this community urgently needs a defined guidance to properly vote on important issues. Weighted ETH vote on Etherchain is a good start. Now we need a clear process. I propose to add to all upcoming EIP voting proposals the ability to vote: "This vote should be void" so at least it gives a chance to voters to express their interest to propose another vote. Also, voting periods should be shorten so we don't waste so much time in debating and voting things that eventually go nowhere (a month is way too long, I propose 2 weeks).

Closed vote results: What should be done regarding proof-of-work issuance until Casper is ready?
Votes Ether Voted %
EIP-1295 7 283.2 0.2
EIP 1234 31 41938.5 27.7
EIP 858 129 108882.9 72.0
EIP 1227 3 65.5 0.0
Total 170 151170.1 100%
Winner by a landslide: EIP-858

[salanki]

There seems to be concern of possible centralization risk with EIP-1295 and also concern about the network impact of EIP-858 and EIP-1234. I've submitted a EIP that proposes a reward reduction similar to EIP-1295 but without changing the reward structure. This EIP is intended as a measured decrease to provide data for making decisions on further decreases in latter hard forks.

@Souptacular I would appreciate if this EIP could be added as an option to the agenda for Fridays meeting.

[OperationNine]

@Souptacular Can you please add EIP 960 into the agenda as it is a fairly straight forward proposal to bring to the table for discussion. Technically it would be very easy to integrate into the Constantinople hardfork and at this stage I feel many others would also support the topic of an ETH hardcap being discussed as we are in the stages of addressing an unnecessary amount of inflation that has been long known about. Please see Vlads Medium post from all the way back to the beginning of 2017 for reference about this: https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfir/the-case-for-smaller-block-rewards-fb0eab38e15c

The 2 popular choices for block reward reduction thus far have proven to be EIP858 with 1 ETH per block and 2 ETH per blocks with EIP 1234. Keeping the block reward the same at 3 ETH shouldn't even be an option really with over 99% of the community vote weighing in favor a needed reduction:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/9bc8i9/monthlong_ethereum_issuance_reduction_coin_vote/

Maybe 1.5 ETH could be some form of compromise?

I would like to point out that current ETH inflation schedule is not what was originally projected back in 2016 as per V's post here for reasons relating to the difficulty bomb delay: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5izcf5/lets_talk_about_the_projected_coin_supply_over/dbc66rd

This is a strong justification for lowering the block reward.

There has been some good discussion happening so far about a hardcap on the Ether supply, and is one of the most commented on EIP's: ethereum/EIPs#960

At 32 ETH per staking validator node, in theory if the hardcap was set at 128,000,000 this would mean a total of 4,000,000 validator nodes if all Ether was staked. Just some food for thought in relation to Vitaliks 120-140M proposal :)

Personally I feel a hardcap would greatly help demonstrate more maturity of the Ethereum Project. Perhaps this is something we can discuss as a community! Hope to be able to hear about it.

[DarkDaoCharlieBrown]

@OperationNine My understanding is only a certain % of ETH will be available for is expected to be staked as Vitalik confirms in a reply to this post. The 4m validator nodes you are quoting is therefore incorrect and too optimistic. Implementing a hardcap doesnt demonstrate any sort of maturity without scientific data to support it and if once proven reductions in the hardcap can always be implemented in the PoS stage of Ethereum through a burn mechanism.

The justification for a reward reduction seems to be to stop any continued fall in price. Some have tried to tie the reward to environmental impact while at the same time suggesting it would lead to an increase in price. Such logic is flawed because the $ cost of mining would continue to be the same should there be a price increase post reward reduction and therefore have no impact on the no. of miners.

Considering all reward reduction proposals are effectively an attempt to "bailout" ETH token holders who have bought ETH for speculative purposes at a high price, I think it would considerate to include EIP-999 in the discussion as a higher priority for a "bailout".

[stobiewan]

@DarkDaoCharlieBrown Read the spec instead of spreading false information. Relevant part is here

"DEPOSIT_SIZE - 32 ETH
MAX_VALIDATOR_COUNT - 222 = 4194304 # Note: this means that up to ~134 million ETH can stake at the same time"

The ongoing cost of mining is not fixed and it is not independent. At steady state it follows price * issuance.

[DarkDaoCharlieBrown]

@stobiewan Please see this post which Vitalik replies to: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7n3t4u/economics_of_staking/drywix6/

Ive edited my post to reflect the correct semantics.

[OperationNine]

@DarkDaoCharlieBrown Please see Vitaliks comments regarding a hardcap.

1. People do broadly support fixed supply
2. Community has gone a long way from "are the core devs up high going to make this happen or not?" closer to "I don't care about the source, I think it's a good idea", but there's still a long way to go to get there

We need to more actively encourage active community involvement especially in deciding economic parameters, which are legitimate tradeoffs between goals and not just a "technocratic security setting".

(Hence why we should bring EIP960 discussion into this developer meeting)

I do now believe that fixed supply is worth considering. Arguments:

• With ASICs, PoW issuance fails at making coin distribution more egalitarian
• With PoS, PoW issuance not needed for security
• With rewards coming from rent+other burned fees, can have rewards without issuance

Source: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/980744740277661696?lang=en

I am agreeing with Vitalik that a hardcap would be well worth the effort. Let's see if by discussing it more we can reach some organic conclusions as a community.

[DarkDaoCharlieBrown]

@OperationNine Please note that only 1 of the 3 arguments made by Vitalik:

• With ASICs, PoW issuance fails at making coin distribution more egalitarian

Could possibly have some relevance (debatable) as announced in June/July 2018, Casper FFG has been delayed by 1-2 years. The last two:

• With PoS, PoW issuance not needed for security
• With rewards coming from rent+other burned fees, can have rewards without issuance

Were reliant on Casper FFG being release this year. Vitalik's tweet you source is from April 2018.