Ethereum Core Devs Meeting 52 Agenda

[Souptacular]

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting 52 Agenda

Meeting Date/Time: Friday 4 January 2019 at 14:00 UTC

Meeting Duration 1.5 hours

YouTube Live Stream Link

Livepeer Stream Link

Constantinople Progress

Agenda

0. Quick announcement about note taking and Gitcoin bounty
1. Testing Updates
2. Client Updates
3. Research Updates
4. Working Group Updates
5. Constantinople HF
6. Istanbul HF / Roadmap
   • schedule for future updates
   • EEP-5
   • EIP-223 formal process of hard forks
7. ProgPoW

[5chdn]

From Gitter

Peter Pratscher @ppratscher 10:27
As the gangnam ProgPoW testnet is running smoothly since a few weeks & the mining ecosystem is maturing (open source implementations for cuda & opencl are more or less done, claymore (the dev of the most widely used closed source gpu ethash miner) has also confirmed to add ProgPoW support to his miner) I think it would be a good time to finalize the discussion if Ethereum should switch to ProgPoW during the next core dev call?

Thanks, ideally a go/no-go decision would be the best outcome, including a rougth timeline if it is a go

[5chdn]

Now, that Constantinople is finalized, I would propose a rough schedule for a subsequent protocol upgrade (a.k.a. "Istanbul"?):

• 2019-01-16 (Wed) projected date for mainnet-hardfork ("Constantinople")
• 2019-05-17 (Fri) hard deadline to accept proposals for "Istanbul"
• 2019-07-19 (Fri) soft deadline for major client implementations
• 2019-08-14 (Wed) projected date for testnet-hardfork (Ropsten, Görli, or ad-hoc testnet)
• 2019-10-16 (Wed) projected date for mainnet-hardfork ("Istanbul")

That breaks down to a fixed 9-months cycle to release protocol upgrades accepted prior to the hard deadline in May to mainnet. All proposals accepted after that date should go into a subsequent hardfork nine months later.

Action items for the call:

• Shall we go with a fixed release cycle in the future?
• Are nine months sufficient, or maybe too ambitious?
• Are we calling it "Istanbul"?
• ref EEP-5: Ethereum Hardfork Process karalabe/eee#5

[peterbitfly]

Regarding ProgPoW here is a summary of the current status (to my knowledge) of the development efforts:

• Parity and Geth have pending PRs that add support for the ProgPoW algorithm
• There are two distinct CUDA & OpenCL open source miner implementations: https://github.com/AndreaLanfranchi/ethminer and https://github.com/EthersocialNetwork/ethminer/
• On the 11.12.2018 a ProgPoW testnet titled Gangnam has been launched which successfully transitioned from Ethash to ProgPoW on block 3000
• The testnet stalled during the first ProgPoW epoch transition. The root cause for this issue was that the only active GPU miner on the network was using an outdated miner that crashed during the epoch transition. The issue was already fixed on a more recent version. Since then the testnet completed 3 additional epoch transitions without any problems.
• ProgPow support was added to Open Ethereum Pool (an open source ethereum mining pool) https://github.com/gangnamtestnet/open-ethereum-pool.
• Verification benchmarks: A well-optimized implementation should end up being about just 2x slower than the ethash verification as there is twice as much data read per iteration. (source Progpow integration go-ethereum#17731 (comment))

Please feel free to amend the list in case I forgot something important

[AndreaLanfranchi]

Just for sake of precision :

• https://github.com/hackmod/ethminer is quite behind
• @hackmod most recent implementation is https://github.com/EthersocialNetwork/ethminer/ which is also based on my work.
• My implementation is continuos WIP and going through optimization phase.

Worth to mention that with my work ethash and progpow live together nicely sharing the same dag data and smoothly switching from one algo to the other.

[holiman]

I'm all for progpow, as I've already said, and in Oct/Nov I hoped to get it into Constantinople when we pushed C into January. However, that would have been only if we had gotten all things working in November, and had a testnet running since then. With the changes to specs and the testnet only up for a few weeks, I think trying to squeeze it into Constantinople would be reckless. I hope to see it accepted, and ideally rolled out within a few months.

I don't think we should wait 9+ months and bundle it with other things. I think this bundle-all-the-things into megaforks is counter-productive.

[lrettig]

Friends, this is obviously an important topic to many of us, but this is not the right forum for debate. This particular thread is intended for planning this Friday's meeting, not for in-depth discussion or debate about individual topics. Scrolling through dozens or hundreds of messages makes Hudson's and my life difficult as we need to review everything to plan for the meeting--it makes it hard to find relevant stuff among all of the messages.

I think the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forum is a reasonable place to continue the debate--would one of you like to open a thread there instead? Feel free to post the link here if you do. Thanks.

[5chdn]

Could someone review/merge ethereum/EIPs#1642 please?

[MariusVanDerWijden]

@naikmyeong You do realize that every light client that does some kind of PoW- Verification has to implement ProgPoW? I haven't seen any implementation (except for Aletha, Parity and Geth) that does it. Additionally every node on the network has to be updated with the new software, every mining pool and every miner. This in itself is already to complicated for a two week timeline. I would therefore also propose a small hardfork with ProgPoW and Stratum 2.0 in mid 2019.

[peterbitfly]

@MariusVanDerWijden I agree, even with everything prepared right now we do not feel confident in switching our pools to ProgPoW in just a two weeks time frame. A small & focused ProgPoW fork in mid 2019 will give the mining ecosystem sufficient time to prepare.

[annavladi]

@lrettig where do I get dial in info for the call tomorrow?

[lrettig]

@annavladi I'll add a YouTube streaming link here shortly. The Zoom call details will be posted to the Gitter channel https://gitter.im/ethereum/AllCoreDevs just before the call.

[lrettig]

YouTube livestream link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSc3TbjZu1k

[axic]

@5chdn should/shouldn't EEP-5 be merged with https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-233 ?

[ghost]

Thank you devs!

[MoneroCrusher]

I'm calling for a gangnam stress-test day. We could make threads on various forums. If miners want ProgPow they have to provide test data (which they will love to do) so development can be done faster and potential bugs can be detected.
Almost no info is out about it, no wonder gangnam has onyly had 30 MH/s.

What's currently the best & easiest miner?

I'm also calling for a separate mini-POW-HF in 1-2 moths if everything can be concluded in January.

thanks for the great effort devs

[5chdn]

See you in two weeks #70

[MariusVanDerWijden]

@MoneroCrusher The newest miner is https://github.com/AndreaLanfranchi/ethminer
It can mine both ethash and progpow and can seemlessly switch between algorithms