Ethereum, the Challenges of Making Successful Updates to a Public Blockchain

Updates to a public blockchain, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, always represent strong headaches. But do they fulfill their ultimate goal?

Making Updates to a Public Blockchain

According to the news agency Bitmania.io, Ethereum scheduled the update of its blockchain, originally, for November, bringing with it a series of design changes to simplify the code of the platform in an attempt to increase performance. However, the non-release in November, ultimately, due to unforeseen problems with the trial version, requiring a longer development period.

Ethereum would implement its next big update, Constantinople, in mid-January 2019. However, it was not possible, because they discovered a major error in the code at the last moment. Even, there were nodes that had already updated the new version.

The Constantinople considered many performance improvements, including the one that took the longest to reach an agreement: the modification in the difficulty bomb. The developers of Ethereum want to migrate from PoW to PoS, so they seek to encourage participants in the network through a series of predefined pumps that will reduce the reward for each block created. Finally, the software that governs this blockchain technology will be updated.

The new update date has not yet been defined. Now, in addition, many primary developers of Ethereum have proposed that their name be Istanbul, instead of Constantinople.

The complexity behind the updates of a blockchain

One of the characteristics of decentralized organizations is the absence of a central authority to make decisions on behalf of their subordinates. Therefore, nobody really determines how the network operates. Blockchains have rules established through a protocol or consensus algorithm and are defined in the code that establishes their operation.

Therefore, the participants of a blockchain – individuals, miners, and blockchain companies – comply with the consensus rules. They are aware that any proposed change in the network requires, in theory, coordination among all its participants who, in most cases, do not know each other.

In a decentralized blockchain, the changes more or less occur in this way:

1. If one of the participants has an idea that he or she would like to implement to improve the characteristics of the network, talk to other participants about it. If your idea has acceptance, write a formal proposal – for example, a bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP).
2. This proposal is shared in the different digital channels, such as mailing lists or forums, in which members of the community participate.
3. If the proposal is considered a good idea, the work usually begins with plans to implement it with other similar improvements. Updates compatible with previous versions of the software can be implemented – very slowly – like a soft fork. Larger changes that are not compatible with the current version must be implemented through a hard bifurcation. Usually, the implementation of this process is very controversial and many users who do not accept the proposed changes and decide to continue using the previous version of the software eventually, create a new blockchain.
4. Each software implementation is updated separately. The update date is announced with due anticipation so that all nodes have sufficient time to update to the latest version of the software. Upon arrival of the update date, the new features of the implementation are activated.

An example of how long this process takes is the implementation of SegWit in the Bitcoin blockchain. Two years of a serious and heated debate passed because hard bifurcations are the last resort in Bitcoin. Finally, SegWit was adopted by a soft fork, after Peter Wuielle – Bitcoin’s primary developer and co-founder of Blockstream – figured out how to do it.

The consensus break in Ethereum and its impact

The research and development of PoS have taken longer than expected, so the developers of Ethereum needed to boost the implementation of the difficulty pump. At the same time, they required that the miners remain on board and not leave the network.

However, when almost 50% of the nodes had already been upgraded to the new software, an independent security contract audit firm, ChainSecurity, found a vulnerability. This forced the update to be postponed until February.

The debate revived because the smart contract programmers – as it cannot be otherwise – want their codes to be immutable, as Ethereum guaranteed in the beginning. They explain that the way in which the code is interpreted through the new updates could significantly affect this property.

In the same way, this debate has spread towards the cryptographic community. He says that making changes in a blockchain is more like space science than the creation of a photo-sharing application. The errors can be fatal and even more difficult to correct after implementation.

What guarantees should the developers of the protocols give to those who create applications at the top of their chain? Is it possible for a small group of developers or some companies to have control over the Ethereum roadmap?

It is indisputable that public blockchain face complex scalability problems, taking into account that they depend on the agreement among their participants. Public blockchains sacrifice efficient decision-making in favor of autonomy and empowerment that are achieved through widespread consensus. We are still far from discovering whether this vision that aims to radically modify the paradigm of social order and modify the balance of power will succeed. To understand the blockchain technology better, you can meet with blockchain companies to see how they can help you integrate blockchain with business.

Author Bio:

Harnil Oza is a CEO of Hyperlink InfoSystem, a mobile app development company based in USA & India having a team of best app developers who deliver best mobile solutions mainly on Android and iOS platform and also listed as one of the top app development companies by leading research platform. He regularly contributes his knowledge on the leading blogging sites.

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