Ethereum 'London' Upgrade Q&A - Virtual

um hello everyone and welcome to this ethereum london virtual event can everyone hear me just checking that the sound is working great perfect i have the signal that it's coming through so yes hello everyone welcome to this ethereum london virtual event we are maybe slightly late to the online events game however we made the decision during the lockdown that we would wait until things began to open up in order to start running things officially again we're planning on getting back to the usual format of events in october hopefully back at imperial college but in the meantime are busy hosting an nft gallery down at rotate bar in schulich with a special london upgrade event happening tomorrow all the details of that are on our meetup page which should be displaying in the button at the bottom there so first of all i wanted to give a quick thanks to john who is blockchase on twitter for helping us immensely to get this event running today as well as antonio and jamie who always seem to be working tirelessly to make so much happen for the wider community put up for their tweets now that's what i know um we are joined today by thomas and marius who are the who is the thomas is the founder of never mind and marius who is on the guest development team at the ethereum foundation welcome to both of you and they will shortly be answering questions from the audience this event is going to be mostly a community-led discussion from the guy from these guys who know way more than i do about the tax side of things so please post your questions into the youtube chat box and our team will be passing them on to me to ask to the speakers but first i'll give a very brief high level overview of what the upgrade itself is so thomas and marius please do correct me afterwards if i get any of the details wrong so on thursday at roughly 1 p.m in the uk the ethereum protocol will implement five new long proposed updates and these are going to be eip1559 which is fairly controversial but the idea is to make more space for network transactions to go through as well as making transaction fees more predictable by burning some of the fees used for executing smart contracts which also makes ethereum less inflationary potentially deflationary but that's another discussion um we have eip 3554 which increases the difficulty of mining on ethereum as part of the preparations for ethereum moving to a proof of stake network which arguably arguably solves a lot of the environmental impact issues that a lot of people are asking questions about they come with proof of work networks we have eip35 which is again the first step towards a bigger set of changes mainly to do with separating code from stored data and for developers this will mean that smart contracts won't be able to be deployed which start with 0xef as this will be reserved for the evm bytecode then we have eip3529 which basically modifies how refunds work in the network as well as if i understand correctly making certain tokens which aim to tokenize gas itself completely worthless the argument being that these tokens just hog computational resources speculation but the others will be able to answer questions on that if anyone has any and finally we have eip three one nine eight which is a companion two one five five nine and this is simply a change which enables smart contract developers to be able to query the minimum price of blocks so that transaction costs can be estimated a lot more easily and this is to do with fees being split into a fixed fee and an inclusion fee uh which some are calling it a tip but um that's a bit of an argue a moot point as well but anyway um now i will get out of the way and hand over to the experts and to the audience so like i said post questions in the youtube chat so maybe we can begin with talking about some of the challenges that have been in the run-up to the upgrade thomas or marius who would like to go first on talking about that maybe thomas can start with like the the the um the beginning of 1559. um i think that's that's quite quite an interesting story how it came to be and then i can i can talk a bit about uh the last couple of months and the issues we had with uh with 1559 yeah sure sure you know like i was learning a bit about the history of it yesterday myself i guess from the from the chat during another community call so myself i personally started working on it around may last year but before that i believe that it started as a set of proposals for vitalik probably in collaboration with other researchers and on how to how to start introducing this idea of of burning ether sparta um of the broader solution that smoothens the um the gas price behavior on the spikes and generally improving the mental behavior to be more responsive to temporary spikes in the transaction block space demand and uh and also to like bring the gas prices down at the time when and when there is no need for the block space and that was picked up initially often by they uh rick dudley and his team uh from vulcanize and they were working on the initial uh gef implementation the prototype um and there some more discussion happened around it i think uh somewhere at the beginning of last year we started the uh the work group and where group where multiple researchers and cardiff started discussing um further implementations modifications and so on um and obviously there are lots of like you know interior magicians if research telegram groups where it was discussed very widely we have recordings all of this all of this was happening in the open as always and i think we started the nether mind prototype very soon around that time so um with eip159 like the initial very initial implementation is very simple so it takes uh maybe a few hours maybe a few days depending on like uh on the mood but then it's all this period of testing of adding some like um edge cases of uh verifying if not only the map will be faced properly and transaction processing but also the like json rpc cli tooling i think that this was particularly a change where the community as a whole needed uh to react to everything and provide the tooling and user experience to match it so i think to see history from my perspective and maurice can go much deeper in many areas other areas yeah i think like that pretty good start on the on the history there um yeah i think what one one of the things we did uh way more with 1559 is community archery outreach i know that um tim from from the ethereum foundation previously from from bisu was uh highly involved in 1559 and like the beginning of 1559 and also he's been leading some some outreach calls to all of the um the other proto um like the downstream projects because the problem with 1559 is that it it introduces a new transaction type so um like in the beginning we only had one type of transactions you just send money to someone or call a smart contract and already in in berlin we introduced a a new transaction type and a way to introduce new transaction types rather easily into the protocol and we had to do that for 1559 as well and i think that required a lot of like the downstream projects to update their tooling to to be able to um to verify execute and create these these new types of transactions so i think a a lot of work was done there um yeah and then in the last couple of couple of weeks a couple of months um uh whenever we like we schedule the hard fork we set certain dates uh for the test nets on which we um like test the changes first first which was also pretty new i think we did it for for berlin as well we create test nets that only have this change available so we create new test nets to to test the changes and and then we start like rolling them out gradually over the existing test nets and then there was uh there were several bugs that we found during testing on the test nets most of them were just minor minor things so we had a lot of like issues in the json rpc which is not really um it's not really critical to the network it's just like a small part of users would be impacted by that and then we had one one big issue um the the the robson uh consensus split um so basically um we after some time we introduced um pretty late to the process we introduced uh three assertions into the code and another mind and geth i didn't actually implement those assertions and open ethereum and bisou implemented them correctly so when one of the assertions was triggered never might be another matter guess or get another mind basically uh created their their own chain um while open ethereum and and bisu uh remained on the correct one and um the problem is on test nets that nethermind and geth have more more miners running on them so the the incorrect chain was actually longer and thus stronger than the correct chain so we what we needed to do was first of all we we looked for the bug and tried to find it and pretty quickly discovered the bug fixed it created a new version and then i had to let my uh i had to let my computer running for like three days creating a new chain that would then like overtake the the incorrect chain to basically hard fork the the network uh back into into the correct state uh because otherwise the the test net wouldn't be uh wouldn't be usable anymore and we had to introduce another hard fork on a a single test net which was which is like pretty bad but yeah so in the end it took i think around four hours to discover and fix the bug um and we really hope that it's going to be the last bug that we had in london but we can we we can of course never be sure um nice um i'm getting a question through um around what is the expected effect do you think on the increased block size on decentralization of the network who wants to pick that one up i think i can talk about this one so i wouldn't say that we have the uh increased blocks highest expectations so the ep 1559 does potentially extends the um the the single block any single block up to 30 million uh just to accommodate for uh for occasional spikes in the base fees but the target remains 15 million so if everything goes as expected you should have on average the 15 million uh gas blocks exactly like nowadays and if you have temporary spikes that afterwards just to bring bass feedback to the to the levels which are normal long-term uh market equilibrium price for the gas price you'll have to have the blocks that are smaller than 30 million uh smaller than 15 million actually which means the average which is maybe maybe slightly higher gas usage in total there should be no change at all and as for the other changes i think that because we have also the aps on the refunds so we expect that there'll be no gas token usage that we're holding the block space for releasing the storage later for the refund so this should have in the long term positive impact on the size of the blockchain it should be smaller because simply it won't be wasted for the cost token usage and other eips that believe did not affect the i don't know if maurice if you want to add something to this yeah so i think um like this this uh refund reduction um um is actually it's pretty good uh because it um like in theory guest tokens do not really increase the size of the blockchain because they get burned after a certain while the problem is that all these transactions of creating those tokens and burning them they have to be executed by everyone every time you you sync a a full note from scratch and that's that's a really big problem so it's especially a pro problem for for archive notes because they actually have to store each and every state in between so if you create a lot of uh contracts and then destroy them again um all of these changes have to be stored by an archive note um they don't have to they can be pruned away by by a full node um but yeah we uh we believe that uh this this nerfing of uh like reduction of refunds uh and getting away with these with these gas tokens is actually pretty good for ethereum for decentralization in the long term nice um mo is asking uh what will happen for staking rewards after eip1559 nothing really so the stacking rewards will be they are they are on the beacon chain they are not yet available to um to to for for the taking on on uh on the e1 chain um so nothing will happen to them um i think in the long run when we switch to uh proof of stake uh we can greatly reduce um the inflation uh the the block reward um because we don't have to uh pay for the like we're paying for the security but when we don't have to pay for the electricity anymore um and so we can like greatly decrease uh the block reward and with 1559 that might even make ethereum deflationary because like a lot of fees might be burned i'm pretty sure that the way it is right now uh if this is not going to be deflationary before the merge um just because we have um we have a pretty high block reward of uh two eve uh per block so uh in order to be deflationary if uh would like the blockchain would need to um burn at least two in transaction fees uh constantly per block and i think that's not um that's not really uh viable and then i think that's not going to happen so everyone who's going to tell you that ether is going to be deflationary after london i would take that with a grain of salt and like that's that's one of the problems uh we cannot really test this on on test nets um because uh testnet ether is just uh it's it's free um so we spend a lot of time uh sending transactions uh with a lot of with a lot of ease and burning a lot of heat i think i burnt like i don't know twenty thousand eve a hundred thousand these uh something like this and of course i would never be able to afford to spend that kind of money on on ethereum um so yeah it might not be deflationary after london but i'm pretty sure it will be deflationary um after after the merge do you have anything to add to that uh no actually this is spot on so i was thinking maybe if uh i believe there was a tweet from team baker recently where it was a calculation of what would have to happen for leave to be deflationary i believe that base we would have to stabilize around 160 gray if i'm not mistaken i can i can try to find it on twitter uh which is pretty high number um it's a good guessing game for all of us to to say what will be really the stable base fee around i'm expecting something between 10 and 20 grey but obviously there are some guesses about what miners will do if they with the fee with the base fee um no really looking forward to to track it on any of the like online available tools when we'll have the base fee moving so i was reading a discussion um earlier today um about how many ether are in in existence and i didn't realize that um miners get rewarded i think if i understood correctly for um doing something with the uncle blocks as well is that correct yes of the above the creator of the block that became uncle and the minor that includes that ankle block are rewarded additional if um after after the uncle blocks appear so we have something like five percent uncle rate on the network and five percent of the blocks have ankles on the network and each uh each ankle practically increases the reward by around like 0.8 if or something altogether which means that instead of a 2 if reward for the block we have 2.8 so um every every situation where you have ankles would require even more burning to do the deflationary network sir i think i agree with mario so we won't see the deflationary ethereum um anytime soon so if i'm my own understanding the um currently miners get rewarded for that and then also for um being the mentor of a block but then also for executing the transaction fees so how many of those things are going away as a result of the ip159 if you think on average nowadays it's like four if per block that the miner receives so maybe a bit less like three point five to four uh i don't know if maurice has the exact numbers and then probably majority of the of the reward from the transaction fees will be disappearing uh from the minor rewards like it will be burnt instead and we should see just the minor tips being awarded to the miners at the same time we've seen in the last months the slow transition of the miners towards the mev and focusing on those systems and i think nowadays we see something like um 0.

1 if on average for the for the miners per block on an mev and this being around 10 i think of the rewards from transactions so yeah i think they will stay with around two and a half if per block yeah i was reading a while ago the flash flash boys research paper about minor extractable value um what how how does conversations and technicalities around my extracurricular value change as a result of this new upgrade as well so there was recently um a research paper published by uh alejo zayas from um from flashbots in cooperation with christophe garza another flagpole steam which is worth to read because it shows what happens to mev after lp 1559 or maybe more like shows what happens to systems like flashballs and i think one one great place to read also about the economical effects of the eip159 would be the team rough gardens uh research paper uh those like very very detailed analysis that was uh commissioned by the foundation uh somewhere like mid 2020 um yeah i think this this london upgrade was really showing a lot of preparation testing from various angles like economical ones the tooling the uh also like the new quality of testing and fuzzing the mario is brought into the uh into the space it's just amazing improvement and on all the ethereal test nets so yeah it's hard to test the economical assumptions but there is a lot of research that can be found also um everything that barnabay uh was preparing from from their team are they i think it's a research incentives group something like that sexy uh i may have uh confused this rig and they're doing a lot of economical analysis of both ethereum two validators and tip1559 and that's definitely a recommended read for for all of you some fantastic jupiter notebooks with uh with the agent simulations of what will happen to the network after the transition marius i think you wanted to say something about that as well yeah i i think barnaby the the the economic research uh economic incentive research group i don't i'm not sure but they're doing pretty good work um i think they're also uh uh doing like um researching uh layer two two stuff and i think um yeah the the um we started talking a bit about um about what happens to mev uh post 1559 i think the biggest change is um that you cannot send zero gas transactions anymore uh you always have to put at least the base fee in otherwise your transaction is not valid anymore so this makes mev extraction slightly harder and slightly more uh more expensive um but i think it's just like you you if you are an mvv searcher right now you have to basically take a look at it improve your protocols improve your impurity code and then everything should work as as normal yeah and oh here we go another question here how likely from jamie hey jamie um how likely is it that miners will run their own competing fork like ethereum el clasico so in my opinion is very unlikely but um so the explanation is uh for for running your own fork you would have to have community support because if you are a big mining pool with uh big hash rate support from the miners if you do something that is very very much against community then the miners will simply switch to the mining pools that support the ap1559 and we think that our list two or three money posted very clearly and openly said we support this network we stay with it because this is what cortex are recommending this is what uh various researchers are recommending can we go there uh which means it will be really hard to do ever a hard work without community support and it's just simply becomes a minority fork and uh maybe exists in the future there you go yeah so i think um there's not a big problem of of 1559 uh it it used to be pretty um pretty controversial uh when it when it got announced and when it was first introduced and miners also uh wanted to to go on strike for a bit which they turned out not to do so i um i don't think we will see any problems tomorrow we don't we haven't seen any forks of gas with our 1559 um that like proliferate uh to to create a new network um there's it's always the possibility uh um there but i think with increased uh value and increased protocols working on in smart contracts working on ethereum we'll see less less competing folks good stuff we have a question from lucas uh are there any economic incentives to spam the chain when close when close to the base free increase um no it's actually very expensive to spam the chain nowadays after ip1559 is much more expensive than it was before because in the past if the miner would decide to for example mine the gas tokens they could do that for free within a block uh if they decided to do that nowadays to fill the block up to this like um 30 million gas level then they'll be burning a lot of money uh and it increases very very fast so it's uh within a few minutes there's already like probably around million dollars of spending to to keep increasing the base fee and also the base fee goes up like 40 times uh within six minutes if you keep pushing it uh so yeah it's actually solving this problem of spamming the network of something useless you have to have the value whoever you are to keep pushing the blocks to be filled so um for those who are concerned about their funds that they've put on ethereum can they feel secure that they'll be safe or who needs to worry because obviously the question the point came up earlier on about certain gas tokens getting becoming completely redundant any thoughts on that yeah so if you if you have gas tokens right now uh you should uh you should burn them as soon as possible um because they are going to be valueless after after the hard fork um i think the funds are as safe as possible um of course there's always a risk in implementing such a huge change because 1559 touches a lot of like really into integral parts of ethereum um there's always the possibility of um an issue coming up um if you want to be really really safe uh i wouldn't advise to do big transactions around the time for the fog just because uh if something happens and we might need to do a quick hard fork or something it could happen that transactions would be rolled back um but yeah in general yeah the the funds are safe we've been doing everything that that was possible to me to to test uh test this this this upgrade i've been sending uh millions of transactions uh over the various test nets uh i've been trying i've been been fuzzing all the different eips in this in this update and if there's a problem it will be figured out pretty pretty fast i think that that that's also what we've seen with uh with the berlin hard fork there in the berlin hard fork uh the open ethereum client had a problem uh which was figured out in i think less than six hours patched and the new version was released and then open ethereum clients could uh could follow the chain um again and yeah so i think we can always if something breaks we can always roll back the chain if the community agrees um so the funds are safe yes nice and for those um who are doing things like yield farming should they wait a bit of time maybe like around three days because will the will the gas prices be lower by next week likely i would say i would say roll back the chain is very controversial statement i think before that would happen i would have a really really big conversation so i don't think we're planning to roll back a chain or or something like that i think i think the understanding is that catastrophical failures would probably lead to some rollbacks being possible so then maybe like for for really huge transactions like in hundreds of millions of dollars it's something you should you should be very cautious around the the fork uh but yeah there'll be probably many many other ways to simply react to any any problems on the chain we did have this discussion of what happens if for example we have uh leading leading clients like gaff that mind majority of the blocks uh creating uh creating things that are maybe not consistent with the initial spec and it's very likely that we simply will switch this back and create additional network upgrade uh really any any rollbacks or the rust resource that we never had to do on the mainnet and that's very unlikely to have anything right yeah so um i think like one question that just came up in chat is uh is uh whether someone should wait uh for three days after the after the fork and what happens to the gas prices around the fork uh so one thing that that will happen is that um everyone that sends a pre uh 1559 transactions will be spending more money that they than they need to so i think probably around the fork the base fee will increase pretty uh pretty quickly um and so um yeah i don't know if you want to be like if if you don't want to spend uh too much money i would uh just look at the chain and see if currently the base fees is like uh extremely high or if it's if it's coming down but yeah basically um try to try to upgrade your software as soon as possible to the new transaction type because that guarantees you the the the least amount of fees paid because with all transaction you will overpay to be included in a blog so i have another question around metamask and other wallet uis so yesterday i was asking and i'm still trying to work out how this all works because i come from a software more of a software background so i'm trying to understand you know how a software hard fork is different to a blockchain network hard fork so one of the questions i asked was if 100 of miners decided to go with hypothetically decided to go with the new upgrade then um would that be would that be an upgrade however if like 51 decided to not do that would that be a hard fork that was what i was trying to trying to find out but the guy on the research and development team over ethereum uh you know it's up to the users uh to decide and i was thinking um which is chosen to be the same as is on the users not on the actual mine is that a correct or something there's always a combination both and is that [Music] is it the users or is it the miners who are the most important in the network um so i had some like technical trouble to understand the question i'm not sure if it's just on me but uh i think i i get the just i think so that's a bit of luck sorry about that i think the question was uh was it more about miners or the community deciding on uh whether fork succeeds or not so obviously miners are the ones that can initiate the the idea of the hard fork but yeah in the social consensus a community is the one that decides in the long term uh so just uh some majority of mining power is not enough to to change the ethereum and say no to everyone because simply that that chain doesn't get uh support from all the tool makers from all the core developers which means that the minority chain would quickly change to say uh oh yeah okay so all the client uh implementations will reject the majority chain or just like focus on this one and then it will be like maybe it becomes interesting if you have like miners forever deciding to never follow the community but then the value would disappear from ethereum very soon and the miners would have no value anymore so then they would start losing power and uh but this is like very unlikely scenario i think they are all aware of this and simply that's why like games theoretically they wouldn't do that so someone is asking um let's see so right now the low gas fee is 49 grey which is painful so good plan is wait until the fifth update metamask and then the gas prices should be lower what do you think of that it's i i it's pretty hard to make uh predictions um there so we we don't we don't really know how um how congested ethereum will be during during the hard fork how the base fee will behave during during and shortly after the hard fork it's pretty sure and it's pretty certain that it will reach a stable equilibrium somewhere in the future but i'm not sure if how how it how it might behave uh uh during that during the heartbreak yeah that's fine so um a question from jamie again sorry i was having a bit of lag there so i'm not sure whether you've answered this or not would you say that metamask and other wallet ui is going to change to accommodate aip1559 yes so we had a lot of discussions about that with tool makers with wallet providers with the json rpc spec because right now it's pretty easy to suggest a gas price and in the future um suggesting the gas price becomes a bit a bit harder because you have to suggest the base fee which basically tells you how fast you can be included and then you also have to suggest that the minor tip and um it's i think it's it's it's going to be difficult a lot of wallets are looking at this i'm not sure how metamask and others will will decide in the end uh what we have what we implemented in in geth and i think in some other clients maybe netherman too is the fee history api basically instead of providing just the fee for a certain transactions you actually gives some kind of indication of how the base fee behaved during the last couple of a couple of days a couple of blocks and then wallets can make a make a suggestion based based on top of this this new fee api nice yeah because it will change from slow medium and fast forward well yeah it's it's it's um it's a question if uh if metamask wants to change it in the ui from slow medium fast um i think what metamask can be can be what mental must can do is create something that that says like inclusion in the next three blocks including in the next six blocks including the next eight blocks of something which which is a better ux really good question from from fox um still will be estimated wrongly the old wallets will continue to work because we still support the old transaction types also the estimating gas it depends so estimating gas usage doesn't change uh or really almost doesn't change not in a way that would be related to ap1559 uh so this remains the same estimating us price as the as the cost uh so this is exactly what maurice was suggesting it's maybe slightly more tricky and will require a bit education over time but uh i think as community learns exactly what the new bass v model means uh also the wallets will learn uh how the users react like what kind of ui the users react best to uh so we should see some period of maybe volatility of creativity on the wallets and then uh some established way of using it yeah yes um and i think it will it would just be a bit higher so all wallets will just estimate the the the gas a bit higher so yeah you you will probably be included in the same blocks as within with the new wallet uh design uh but you will overpay for that and uh so there's an incentive for you to switch to a new wallet which supports nice um i really like this question from from lucas do you have a favorite change in the hard work i i do i i think um uh the the preventing uh contracts uh with uh with the zero xef byte uh that's uh eip3541 is a really cool change um because um it's like it doesn't really do much right now uh but in the future it allows us to create specific types of contracts so basically this this magic byte allows us to hard fork some some specific contracts or like contract types into it which could be used for example uh to have contracts that uh that are checked for valid jump destinations uh during um during the initialization which would would which would uh make uh the jump test analysis um so basically whenever you you execute a a smart contract uh the node has to do a an analysis of all uh all the jumps that can be executed in this in this program and um this takes quite a bit of time i think around six percent of uh of transaction execution uh i measured like two weeks ago and um so in the future we might have uh um contracts uh that are proven at run like at deployment time uh to to be uh uh like to be well-rounded and so these don't require jump test analysis anymore uh which would uh improve the speed for them uh quite a bit and we can also do other types of contracts with with this with this three five for one uh change thomas do you have any favorite changes yeah i'm under one consistently saying that eat one five five nine is my favorite um so but i also appreciate the other changes and i understand where they're coming from and so the one in maurice was talking about 0xdf i see that lots of car developers see that as a symbol of improvement of the quality of the process of like as being escorted being able to to plan for a few forks ahead um in a way berlin with 2718 was already this like a similar change that said oh somehow we get a tool to make changes much uh much better changes in the future we can start introducing new transaction types and then we do the same thing with the with the smart contracts and the code and the bytecode and tooling around the analysis of it which can bring a lot of improvements but yeah eep one five five nine maybe it's simply too too easy to say this is the favorite change but i i think it brings a lot of a lot of excitement and improvement in ux in the long term uh even with some turbulence at the beginning simply because of maybe some misunderstandings with the users but there was lots of effort in education and testing and tooling do you both have a stressful couple of days ahead or is it going to be quite relaxed for you but i think that we are coming prepared i mean like i was talking today to to marek who is leading lots of uh effort and then mindsight for uh for this park and and i see like the level of preparation which is based mostly on the on the effort from maurice and the testing team and all the all the work from gaff team in collaboration with other clients uh so it's good to see that also as a team we've prepared for like we've done the fire drills we've prepared all the documents how to react fast how to react to any potential consensus issues and one very comforting thing was like the last last consensus this year after berlin we've seen all the team uh all the client teams getting together on the call supporting each other helping trying to solve the problem together so this kind of cooperation among all the team all the client teams is something that's very um vertical thing that you can rely on so so that's probably why there is less stress more excitement than stress i think and i think that in itself you know is um can give people confidence to continue using ethereum you know the community even though sometimes it can seem like it's all over the place it is a massive network of people all sort of aiming for the same goal and you know um we managed to we managed to pull things off and i think i like that's the beauty of it instead of um sometimes when there's too much top down control it can can cause more problems than when it's more like this um i have one question we're going to start wrapping up um there are some great questions coming through but um we're going to have to start wrapping up because we need to finish on the hour um but i one of my biggest questions was how would it's quite a simple question but how would you explain what a hard fork is to a six-year-old so i think um the the the term hard focus is uh pretty overloaded um in in in blockchain terms uh so uh like a lot of people refer to uh like splitting off the network as a hard fork and i and that's not really like that's a hard for me um our net network upgrades although they are potentially hard forks um i would just call them network upgrades um so um i'm on vacation right now with like a lot of non-technical people and i've been uh talking talking to them and saying um yeah we have we have an update coming and this update uh changes the rule of the system a bit um and uh yeah that that would be my explanation for for a six-year-old we have we have something some some adjustments that needs to be done that need to be done and uh we're doing an update basically i think update is a lot less of loaded languages and i think hard fork can sort of especially to when you're speaking to investors or business people the word hard fork can sort of be a little bit intimidating so i've actually started using upgrade as well as terminology um [Music] so jamie's asking again will there be another hard fork before the merge i presume he means 2.0 we don't know yet so um there are there is a um and up a hard fork scheduled for uh the end of this year because uh we've been um so one of the eips is is pushing the the difficulty bomb which is a mechanism that forces miners to update the software after a certain period of time and this pushes the difficulty bomb to december i think roughly december 20 2021 and so we will have another hard fork around december 2021 um i know that thomas is uh pretty um uh thinks that we can we can pull off the the merge before that i would be a bit less optimistical i think q1 2022 is as the earliest we can we can do it but yeah there might be another hard fork we don't know yet if there's going to be a hard fork that just pushes the difficulty bomb or if there is going to be significant changes uh significant uh eaps in that there's an ongoing discussion about that if you want to learn more about this um and listen uh listen into the these discussions uh there's an all-court of call every second friday uh which is live streamed on on youtube uh so you can listen in and see what the what the devs uh are discussing uh uh scheduling wise and uh whether whether to include eaps into this hardware government because it's just if people were frustrated with updating applications on their iphones or on their android devices it must be a heck of a lot more frustrating for those up upgrading uh protocols which many many other things rely on um so the next the name for the next hard foot i know altair is the next one for east 2.0 if i understand correctly what's the next hard fork name for east one before it merges into east 2.0 it's shanghai so basically the the hard fork names after constantinople or petersburg are now um the locations where uh defcon the the ethereum developer can conference used to be so it's berlin london shanghai cancun uh prague osaka and bogota hopefully bogota end of this year maybe next year we don't know yet but we're really looking forward to it nice we can expect that a bugatta heartbreak will be delayed the um are they are they well i was going to ask if they were named in order of the the conferences that they happened but um yeah hopefully well we'll see what happens with that but um did either of you make it down to ecc in paris as well or watch any of the streams um i didn't i was i was a bit scared because i wasn't vaccinated yet i wanted to do a a talk but unfortunately they there was a problem with the venue so if anyone from the audience wants to hear my talk on how to interact with ethereum using go we're going to do another live stream for that somewhere in the future when i'm back from vacation how about you thomas hi yeah i i had a pleasure to like for me if cc was a bit like uh there's this rapper around pandemic because i've been to the fcc last year jasmine pandemic was starting and then this year i managed to just like rush my vaccination and get to france and yeah i've had a chance to give talks on like three areas that i work with uh it's like uh euler flashbots nevermind uh if two and so so it was a fantastic conference actually i was uh lots of opportunities to meet people to to learn at what's happening you could see that people are just missing those uh events and wanting to uh to explore the blockchain and just simply meet and talk so i'm gonna speak speak as you mentioned uh meeting other people i'm going to take this opportunity to promote the nft gallery that um jamie has done so fantastically of setting up and thanks to james as well at rotate bar for letting us use that space for that and to known origin as well um but yeah we're running an nft bar or nft gallery in a bar in shoreditch so if anyone is um you know not super concerned about well i think we should all still be careful with covid but um you know if people are feeling comfortable enough to come down then then definitely come down and see us there especially tomorrow as we have the second ethereum london network upgrade um as some people are suggesting it should be called instead of hard fork but yeah come down see that meet some people have some chats have some drinks um just to finish off uh let's finish with looking to the future because that's what this community does you know always trying to improve things and make make everything better um east 2.0 when's that going to come i don't want to put you on the spot what are the challenges leading up to that and yeah how can the community help best prepare for that um i think it's as i said uh i i i would be like end of this year is highly highly optimistic i think uh especially because uh because of testing so i'm doing a lot of testing and death and and fuzzing and stuff so um i'm always like more on the cautious side and we just have to face the facts like ethereum is is it's in it's a network of like 200 billion i think yeah it's 200 billion dollars or something um so like introducing such a big change into this network just requires a lot of testing and we can like we can only do this once and get it right once um [Music] i'm currently like yes as i said i'm on vacation uh so i was a bit bored and started uh implementing implementing my own eth2 client um so i just just to get to know the like the the ideas that they introduced because i think the e2 and eth1 teams are were a bit separate and in the last couple of months especially we had we had one hackathon where we prototyped proof-of-stake test net where you can actually send transactions and um yeah so i think it's going to be cool but it will also require a lot of more additional work but yeah we're we're on it nice good stuff right well i think we're almost um at the end um i just wanted to say a big thanks again to you both for joining and i'll just put your twitter's back up um follow thomas on twitter and marius on twitter um thanks again so much to john who's blockchase and to nft london uk for helping us to run the event and follow east london on twitter at east london subscribe to our meetup as well for upcoming events and my twitter is timmhc youtube so yeah thank you very much guys and hope to see you again soon and enjoy your holiday memories thank you so much team for organizing thank you so much and thanks to antonio and jamie who have been working behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly and ciao for now bye