Ethereum 2.0 Testnet When???

Teku! This is the new boy from PegaSys of ConsenSys and he is now talking to Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse.

The problem is that he is on a slightly old phoneline and the talking seems to be only one way. To get to the actual testnet, it seems there is a lot more work to do. Danny Ryan, the eth 2.0 coordinator, says:

“I will note that this is a v0.10 testnet (one lighthouse put up a few months ago), and that Lighthouse is still the only one ‘producing’ (i.e. making blocks and attestations) on the testnet. It’s time to get excited but we still have some work to do.

A couple of clients are inches from v0.11 testnets. We’ll see a couple of these go live very soon. From there, we’ll see some similar multi-client smoke sync tests and validator tests. When a couple of clients do well here, we’ll have a few shared genesis starts with those two clients. A successful shared genesis net will then probably be opened as a “semi-public” testnet. Semi-public meaning that the bulk of it will still be run by the client teams.

This will all be to lay the groundwork for a fully public multi-client testnet. I’ll be excited along the way, but this is the really major goal I’m looking forward to. We’ll have a deposit contract on Georli launched prior to some date in which the testnet will start.”

The version 0.10 spec is the one before the audit. The new spec, version 0.11.1 was launched on the 31st of March and that’s kind of the final spec where the testnet is concerned.

There will be a another spec then, version 1, for the live launch. For now however the focus is on getting single client testnets on this post-audit spec and of course getting them to run somewhat normally.

Ryan says “a couple of clients are inches from v0.11 testnets,” but by inches he probably means a couple of weeks or maybe a month or so as the spec went out only just over a week ago.

Those single client testnets will then need to run for some time, so another month sends us to June. Then interop with semi-public testnets, July. August perhaps for the actual multi-client public testnet, or as usually was called just testnet.

Meaning it may well be the case the genesis block for the live network risks not going out this year at all as the target date keeps being pushed while we are told of “very soon.”

To his credit Ryan has laid above a fairly clear ‘to do,’ but we’re talking many more months for the skeleton blockchain where basically you cant do anything save for seeing what the current Proof of Work blockchain is doing – and obviously getting rewards for it on what effectively would be a testnet itself as the skeleton blockchain can’t do much at all really.

They then need to add storage sharding, which at this pace next year is optimistic, and still basically you can’t do anything save for maybe making it a little bit better for dapps.

Then there is the actual full launch when sharding actually goes live and we have increased capacity for value transfers.

As it stands that full launch is hazy, conceptual, moving, and basically abstract, with much needed to be done to even have it working on the board, let alone in code. So they lied.

At least now we know, and so can add “very soon” to two weeks and weeks not months and soonish.

There is also the obvious risk that this is all just goose chasing, with the real solution to scalability perhaps being just the pruning of old data which no one cares about.

That would lower synchronizing costs and so on, and thus would make running a node as easy as it is now, but with far more scale.

Without that bounding of data, sharding adds a bit more capacity but potentially at the expense of efficiency, even for the blockchain, and clearly at the requirement of far too much time as the incentives here might be inverted in as far as promising “soon” might for ‘them’ make more sense than just getting it done and so leaving ethereans with ‘nothing’ to look forward towards.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Devs hold power, and they now even censor in the dev controlled r/ethereum, and therefore we keep getting “very soon” while by “soon” they mean not soon at all.

The question is whether it matters, and the answer is of course, and the solution is competition, because we all know what COMMUNISM means, and open source is very communistic.

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