Top 3 Ethereum Metropolis Changes to Look Forward to

JP Buntinx June 28, 2017
https://themerkle.com/top-3-ethereum-metropolis-changes-to-look-forward-to/?utm_medium=push&utm_source=onesignal&utm_campaign=traffic%20boost&utm_content=extended%20%traffic%boost

Below are three changes which many people are looking forward to when Metropolis launches.

METROPOLIS IS THE NEXT ETHEREUM HARD FORK

Metropolis is ETH developers step toward simplification to welcome new users. Included will be gas cost distribution, moving to more anonymization and user security. ETH will remain flexiable, it remains to be seen what upgrades will be ready, agreed upon and implemented. September 1st a tentative date.

Below are three changes which many people are looking forward to when Metropolis launches.

ZK-SNARKS

Providing the cryptographic primitives for this technology, although it doesn’t mean full transaction privacy can be achieved from day one. The key to adding such capabilities to Ethereum is zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) – precisely the cryptographic engine underlying Zcash.One of the goals of the Zcash company, codenamed Project Alchemy, is to enable a direct decentralized exchange between Ethereum and Zcash. Connecting these two blockchains and technologies, one focusing on programmability and the other on privacy, is a natural way to facilitate the development of applications requiring both.

As part of the Zcash/Ethereum technical collaboration, is a proof of concept implementation of a zk-SNARK verifier written in Solidity, based on pre-compiled Ethereum contracts

Zero-knowledge proofs
The goal of zero-knowledge proofs is for a verifier to be able to convince herself that a prover possesses knowledge of a secret parameter, called a witness, satisfying some relation, without revealing the witness to the verifier or anyone else. More on Zero-knowledge proofs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge_proof

ACCOUNT ABSTRACTION [User Security]

Account abstraction allows users to “define” their wallet address – of which they own the private key – in the form of a smart contract. More specifically, this change means private keys used to control an external account would be less susceptible to attacks executed by quantum computers against the signature scheme being used right now. Other security measures can flexibly be added. According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA is intent on building a quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption. The NSA is also storing some protected messages and files in the hope that someday it will be able to break into them. This is all far down the line of technological development.

Account abstraction also allows for contracts to pay for gas by a service provider versus just the user.

RETURNDATA* AND REVERT

By using the new RETURNDATA* opcodes, developers can make [smart] contracts return variable sized values.

Additionally, 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.

Developer agenda discussions are searchable:
https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/207

EIP's (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)

Normally meets the first and third Friday of every month at 14:00 UTC.

Please provide comments to add or correct agenda topics.

New EIP GitHub process and cleanup. [Facilitator: Hudson]
Come to final agreement on EIP 196: zk-SNARK precompiles [Facilitator: Christian]
Update on EIP for precompiles for elliptic curve point addition, elliptic curve scalar multiplication and pairing [Facilitator: Christian]
Metropolis and associated EIPs. [Facilitator: Vitalik/Christian]
EIP 5/8: Gas costs for return values [Facilitator: Christian]
EIP 86: Proposed initial abstraction changes for Metropolis [Facilitator: Vitalik]
EIP 96: putting block hashes and state roots into the state [Facilitator: Vitalik]
EIP 100: uncle mining incentive fix [Facilitator: Vitalik]
EIPs 196 & 197: pairings [Facilitator: Christian/Vitalik]
EIP 198: bigint arithmetic [Facilitator: Vitalik]
ethereum/EIPs#206: Revert OPCODE and ethereum/EIPs#207: Encoding of revert OPCODE [Facilitator: Vitalik]
STATIC_CALL: ethereum/EIPs#116 follow-up. [Facilitator: Christian]

https://themerkle.com/author/writer10/ Jdebunt
https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/5