III | Driving on the DEXON highway through Constantinople: Will Ethereum be the lost empire of Byzantine? | SimplyPut

DEXON vs. Ethereum’s hard fork, Constantinople

I I was driving on the D110 state road across Istanbul the other day. The grandeur of the magnificent structures of ancient Constantinople never failed to leave me in awe. It left me thinking: All these grand structures, ultimately have to give way to the elapse of time, relegating as memories of the golden era of the once great Byzantine empire.

As though history is repeating itself, there’s all this hype these couple of weeks regarding the Constantinople hard fork of Ethereum. This seems to have driven the Ethereum community crazy, staying as divided as the modern and ancient quarters of modern Istanbul. For those you who may not be fully aware of what the Constantinople hard fork entails, here’s what you need to know:

• Latest update in the Metropolis phase of the Ethereum launch process
• Hard fork previously slated to take place on January 16, 2019
• 5 EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) introduced, with the most controversial update being EIP 1234. This improvement is essentially a pseudo-voluntary approach aimed at removing the difficulty bomb from Ethereum’s network and reduce block rewards from 3 to 2 ETH over a 12-month timeframe.
• The Constantinople hard fork is currently delayed for about 12 months by accelerating the ‘ice age’ (difficulty bomb) in block mining up to block 7,080,000 (when the hard fork will take place)
  How will this affect the average user?

In short, this change does not change the fundamental fact that Ethereum is still based on PoW, which involves energy-intensive and low-efficiency processes to solve crypto puzzles known as mining. Confirmation time will not be improved. Regarding transaction cost and TPS, it’s pretty much still the same. Ideally, the optimization of smart contract interactions and the optimization of state channels through EIP-1024 should provide some improvement. But with the basic infrastructure unchanged, you just need another CryptoKitties mania to paralyze the entire network.

So why not just bite the bullet and hard fork?

As with the spirit of the free market and vested interests, attempting to change the status quo of this behemoth is no easy feat. First thing that comes to mind is the swathes of mining facilities poured into mining ETH (think rows and rows of processes in a hot and humid room buzzing away trying to crunch through math puzzles). Owners of those machines will most definitely be the first to jump out and oppose the hard fork. Just imagine their precious crypto-gold diggers suddenly rendered useless at the snap of the fingers, from PoW to PoS. Magic. Just like that.

But more importantly, there is still the risk of re-entrancy attack that will make the Ethereum network vulnerable. In a nutshell, this attack can be characterized such that malicious players will be able to withdraw from vulnerable accounts from the same source several times until the wallet is depleted. In the meantime, attackers can gain access to the flow of control of Ethereum smart contracts. And of course, all these will directly cause ETH price to plummet south. Not good for any ETH holders or investors.

All these factors, as well as a somewhat divisive Ethereum community, has led to Ethereum developers delaying the hard fork till some form of consensus is reached.

Solving these issues using the state-of-the-art DEXON blockchain

In all its awe and glory, DEXON is essentially a blocklattice DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) that is based on DPoS with strong security, scalability, and performance characteristics. This converts into extremely high TPS and scaling potential without sacrificing any of the attributes of what blockchain proponents hope to achieve.

In other words, imagine Ethereum is a freeway that is currently congested. The workaround to solving the congestion is by forcefully widening the roads by sacrificing the interests of those who have previously invested and believed in the network. But fundamentally, the PoW consensus algorithm remains unchanged, still as energy-guzzling, as expensive and slow. Thus, building on those foundations will essentially mean that the ecosystem will ultimately crumble under its own weight.

On the other hand, DEXON is like a brand-new and ultra-fast autobahn that is readily capable of fast speed and performance. This helps pave the way to solve any issues pertaining to the need of a top-grade network capable of industrial throughputs. With an extremely low gas fee, secure, and hyper decentralized system, building a shining metropolis of DApps on DEXON is now much more attainable than before.

Looking back, the congestion on Ethereum seems set to continue for some time to come. Without any actual infrastructural changes, it will relegate in history as the once great Constantinople of Byzantine, into technological antiquity. We just have to wait and see how things work out in the end.

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