Summary of key points:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing for the Ethereum network to be better prepared in the face of a 51% attack.
He argued that automatic responses to such attacks should be prepared to reduce stress on a social level.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing the network to review and prepare for a hypothetical 51% attack
"This is something I would advocate we do more research on and build on," he said during a keynote address at the ETHCC in Brussels.
Buterin is considering the concept of a 51% attack, a state in which a malicious actor (or multiple actors working in coordination) produces more Ethereum blocks than honest actors. He believes one of the biggest concerns is that this could lead to censorship online.
As a potential response to this attack, he said that honest validators should move to a branch of the chain. The current plan relies mainly on social consensus, with community members working together to reach branch agreements.
However, Buterin believes it would be better if the network were better prepared for such a response. It would be best if this response were largely automated and planned in advance, he said.
“We want to automate the response to 51% attacks as much as possible. So if you are a validator, then your node should be running software that if it detects that a transaction is censored, or some validator is censored or it is being censored, it The majority chain will be automatically anti-censorship, and all honest nodes will automatically coordinate to use the same minority software as a result of the code they are running.”
Buterin admitted that it would be impossible to automatically move 100% of the network to branches because of many limitations. But he said: "The closer you can get to that, the less effort social consensus will take."
The technical layer needs to at least provide a clear winning soft fork candidate so that the community can unite when it needs to escape the censorship chain.
Buterin’s other advice for Ethereum
Buterin also advocates for increased light client adoption at the infrastructure level of Ethereum, specifically including wallets. He said they should also support authentication of zk-EVM, further supporting Layer 2 networking.
He also discussed the issue of quantum resistance. He noted that this is an open issue for the Ethereum blockchain. However, he believes that the network faces four risk elements - Merkle trees, consensus signatures, data blocks and user accounts - but each has its own solutions.
In addition, he pushed for further simplification of the protocol to make it easier for developers and users to use it.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reprinted with permission from: Foresight News
Original author: Tim Copeland
