Metropolis - Ethereum hard fork. What you need to know?

Just after we were struck by the news of forking of bitcoin, now comes another forking news from Ethereum. Trend of forking is inevitably the way to grow in cryptocurrency. If we look at the history of improvement by Ethereum, this is the fourth time Ethereum will be upgrading. Do you even realise that?

sources : wikipedia.com

Olympic - first public beta release
Frontier - Experimental release of Ethereum platform
Homestead - (current protocol) Improvement made on transaction processing, gas pricing, and security
Metropolis - ???

So what kind of improvement Metropolis bring us?

1. Proof of work transforming to Proof of stake

Proof of work is extremely energy-consuming, costly and time consuming. It takes a lot of computational trial and error in average just to produce a valid proof of work. While proof of stake is much greener, ether users can vote through how much ether in they stake in wallet. They are called validators. Thus, needless of any mining activities. As with bitcoin, we saw a lot of news that miners have final say when it comes to the decision on improvement of bitcoin. There's still way for miners to manipulate bitcoin as we saw with the latest case with segwit activation. Some miners deliberately mine an empty block just to slow down the system of transaction in protest of Segwit. Without miners, proof of stake is more directive towards decentralized community where not particular party have the final say.

This diagram basically sums up everything :

2. Integration of Zcash cryptographic engine (zk-SNARKs)

Zcash is an anonymous coin. It uses zero knowledge proof to preserve the anonymity. What is it? Zero knowledge is an ingenious method to make a prover of a transaction to show that he's the legitimate person to transfer to without revealing anything about the transaction. For example, the cost, to which address, and etc. Wonder how it really works? Refer to this link.

Sources :

3. Easier programming and smart contract upgrades

This is definitely a great news for smart contract developers, as added new feature such as ReturnDATA* and REVERT opcodes

contracts will benefit a lot from the REVERT opcode as well. This feature effectively allows contracts to revert and fail, yet it won’t use up all of the gas. When combined with the RETURNDATA* option, developers may finally be able to properly work with exception handling. Plus, contracts will “explain” why they failed. The “out of gas” code is not exactly informative, and more detailed responses are to be expected.

Sources : https://themerkle.com/top-3-ethereum-metropolis-changes-to-look-forward-to/

4. Account masking

This is great news for security maniac. Those who really want to protect their account by using a temporary address can do so with owned private key. It's not something really awesome, but nice to have feature for maximum security.

5. Difficulty bomb aka Ethereum Ice age

How Ethereum plans to "coerce" us to switch from proof of work to proof of stake is by exponentially increasing the mining difficulty until it's impossible to mine for profit. As of now, after DAO hard fork from ETC, the difficulty bomb is ticking a lot faster than originally planned. So dont buy those Ethereum mining contracts from any cloud mining.

• Extra tips : As difficulty in mining will rise, it means less coin in circulation thus price will be high at this point. It's wise to buy ether when it's low now. That's my speculation, we do have to consider unforeseen challenges during the upgrade which might drive the price low. But I remain upbeat, as Ethereum are always very wary of these challenges as we seen with so many upgrade protocols.

Hope you enjoyed my analysis. Tried to make it simple but info-packed. If you like it, please do the following :