Ethereum core developers meeting update (August 25, 2017)
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #23Ethereum Foundation’s core developers meeting was streamed live yesterday, August 25, 2017 on youtube. The meeting agenda can be found here. Souptacular published the highlights of the meeting in Reddit.Metropolis updatesMetropolis is now split into 2 hard forks:
- Byzantium
- Constantinople.
Timelines for launch of Byzantium
- Within the next 7–10 days, benchmarks for gas costs should be completed.
- Once the gas costs benchmarks are finalized and the clients complete implementation of the Byzantium EIPs, a hard fork on the Ropsten testnet would be launched, that would run for 2–4 weeks.
- Creative ways to sync Ropsten will be looked into, as it is hard to sync. Example: Using lightsync, fastsync, or warpsync, depending on client.
- Block number for the mainnet hard fork will be decided at the earliest. Ballpark block numbers are : block 4.3 million on Sept. 22nd and worst case is block 4.4 million Oct. 27th, so the hardfork will likely be between those two times. We are aiming for sometime late September.
EIP 649: Metropolis (Byzantium) Difficulty Bomb Delay and Issuance Reduction discussion.
- Issuance reduction for the Byzantium hard fork will be 3 ETH in accordance with EIP 649.
Certain parties felt left out in the conversation around EIPs and network changes. Souptacular mentioned that, this type of changes can be reversed or modified in future hard forks with enough community and developer consensus. - Vitalik tweeted Ethereum difficulty adjustment, and how it reacts to various network stresses.
Updates to Metropolis testing.
- The testing team has grown significantly from 3 people to 7 people.
- Big shout out to Dimitry, Casey D., Yoichi, Martin H.S, Tim S., Jared W., Matthew E. who have contributed to the testing efforts!
- Testing is proceeding more smoothly and major clients, including Parity and geth, have implemented most or all of the EIPs that are going into Byzantium.
- /u/cdetrio created an awesome tool for running state tests on multiple clients (starts at 40:41).
Determining gas prices for new opcodes & pre-compiles
Tim S. (Testing), Arkidiy (Parity), and Martin H.S (Testing) will be working to get the opcode benchmarks necessary to complete gas cost analysis prior to launching Byzantium on the testnet.
Ice Age Updates
Block times:
- 23 seconds now (block #4200000)
- 30 seconds on Sept. 22nd (block #4300000)
- 39 seconds on Oct. 27th (block #4400000)
Clients represented in the meeting
♣ geth (Go)- https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues?q=label%3Ametropolis+is%3Aclosed
♣ Parity (Rust)- paritytech/parity#4833
♣ cpp-ethereum (C++)- ethereum/cpp-ethereum#4050
♣ ethereumJS (Javascript)
♣ ethereumJ (Java)
♣ pyethapp (Python)
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