Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine, gave a fresh exhaustive update to the cryptocurrency community on the progress and the long journey that the Ethereum Casper project has been through. These he gave in 75 well-explained tweets on Twitter.
Mission To Become A Proof-of-Stake System
As posted on Twitter, the journey towards a much better and faster Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, called the Casper began in 2014. Vitalik stated that “Ethereum proof-of-stake research began in Jan 2014 with Slasher. Though the algorithm is highly suboptimal, it introduced some important ideas, most particularly the use of penalties to solve the nothing at stake problem.”
The challenges faced by the suboptimal algorithm made it prone to long-range attack. Vlad Zamfir joined the team later in 2014 and started off with research on the Casper project which involves tweaking a consensus algorithm, which uses the Byzantine Fault Tolerance theory, such as Tendermint. The Byzantine fault tolerance theory was still considered to be suboptimal which led to the use of correction by construction (Casper CBC) algorithm.
Further work on the Casper project led to Buterin discovering Casper FFG. The two, Casper CBC and FFG will be overlays of the present ecosystem, this he clearly pointed out in one of his tweets:
“Note that Casper CBC and Casper FFG are *both* “overlays” that need to be applied on top of some existing fork choice rule, though the abstractions work in different ways.”
As of now, the two algorithms seem to be acceptable by the lead , and when all is set, the Casper CBC and the FFG would be running side by side on the network for better efficiency and a much more secure network. Explaining how this would be done, Vitalik cited that “in the initial version of Casper FFG, proof of work would “run” the chain block-by-block, and the proof of stake would follow close behind to finalize blocks. Casper CBC was full proof of stake from the start.”
Also in his opinion, Vitalik pointed out that the main tradeoff between FFG and CBC is that CBC seems to have nicer theoretical properties, but FFG trumps it in terms of ease of implementation.
Casper At Its Final Stages
Buterin made it known that further progress is still going on with the proof-of-stake, as they gear towards launching it next year, even though the first version of the Casper project is already released on the project’s GitHub page.
He finally reiterated the primary purpose of the project of proof-of-stake Casper project which is to fight against an attack on the blockchain network, especially the 51% attack with the 99% fault-tolerant consensus.
What is left for the final launch is a formal proof, refinement to the specification on both the CBC and FFG which is presently being handled by the development team.
