Ethereum's HOMESTEAD protocol upgrade and what it means for SOILcoin
Theres been a LOT of hype regarding the Homestead release of Ethereum, and many questions here regarding SOILcoin's adoption of the protocol changes that are a part of this release. We will be watching the Homestead release forums for potential bugs, in the case of needed hotfixes, but we are planning on adopting this change in conventions as soon as possible. Just as with ETH, this will require a hard-fork on the SOIL network, as there are backwards-incompatible protocol changes involved, so we want to be absotively sure that it works as advertised.
So, what DOES Homestead change? The simplest explanation is that it brings the EVM out of the "beta stage" as the network there has been stress tested well enough, thereve been no successful attacks on the blockchain, and thus.. where the Frontier release was intended for developers and such, Homestead is intended to be usable to more casual participants. In simplest terms, Homestead is Ethereum's coming of age.
The hope is that Homestead will allow for an easier adoption and mining experience thru GUI wallets and clients rather than the current norm of using the command line interface. The "Ethereum browser" Mist has been out in beta for quite awhile in beta. Peter has actually ported that over to SOIL (tentatively called "Dust") and Ive been using it for a few months as a wallet management and contract deployment tool. Mist has been upgraded to the Homestead code, so Im hoping we can quickly release Dust 2.0 for SOILcoin users as well. It would serve as a much more stable version of our SOILsafe GUI wallet.
The AlethZero development environment is also in the works for a standalone (and stable) client across different platforms. (It didnt work very well for me using windows but worked well on Ubuntu) Im hoping they get this done in a timely manner as Id like to see an implementation of it for SOIL.
Furthermore, its expected that Homestead will act as an infrastructural roadmap for the expected implentation of Swarm (a decentralized and incentivized p2p storage protocol) which is VERY exciting. This will allow information to be stored on the blockchain, retrievable by it's cryptographic hash value. It will hopefully also finalize the execution of Whisper, a sort of p2p cryptographically secure messaging service over the blockchain.
As for the deeper effects of Homestead, these include a few things that will be very important to SOIL. Chiefly among these is a fundamental change to the difficulty adjustment algorithm, which we've seen in negative effect recently with the massively long block times due to a "quick to increase/slow to decrease" adjustment schemata. Ethereum also experienced issues with their block time distribution, as the system had an incentive to set the timestamp difference between blocks to equal "parent_timestamp +1" thus the difficulty algorithm would target the median targeted time, but the mean time began increasing. The new algorithm is built to target the mean block time average instead of the median time, which should, using this new formula, make it mathematically impossible in the long term to have block times exceeding 24 seconds (based on our 13 second targeted block time) This will, naturally, keep the system running MUCH smoother, and keep our mintage distribution model running along the proper curve.
The cost for creating contracts via transactions will increase from 21000 gas to 53000. Also, should a contract run out of gas during deployment, the creation fails, preventing empty contracts from being deployed.
A new opcode, "DELEGATECALL" has been introduced, which allows contracts to store "pass through information" while following msg.sender and msg.value from its "parent contract" to the "child contract". This allows for contracts which can create other contracts, but doesnt repeat additional exact-information from the parent contract, which saves gas, and thus.. MONEY. This makes it much easier for a contract to store another address as an inconstant source of code and pass through calls to it.
This will eventually enable the ability for contracts to call other contracts in a much more straightforward manner, so building contract code that references other contracts by their address and allows the fractional architecture to build large scale dApps using contracts that already exist on the SOILnet as part of their superstructure (i.e. - a dApp built to design and optimize solar cell installations can call upon a contract that has a weather forecasting service, or a solar penetration algorithm, without having to build those capabilities into the dApp itself.)
The final change implemented with Homestead is a change to the RLPx Discovery Protocol and the RLPx TCP transfer protocols. This will certify that all the differing client software presently used on the network (cpp, go, etc.) can cope with future protocol changes to the network. This corrects a problem where older clients werent accepting updates to the network protocol, and were refusing communications.
As mentioned, we will adjust teh SOILcoin network to the Homestead transition, and where there arent many overall changes to the underlying protocol, its generally better to err on teh side of caution. Id assume that we will effect the conversion within a week of Ethereum modifying its system with a hard fork which is scheduled to occur tomorrow. That being said, if you do use Ethereum, UPDATE YOUR CLIENTS.
I think some of the changes will greatly benefit SOIL, especially the changes to the difficulty adjustment algorithm. Hope this article has been helpful... and in closing, i just wanted to express my appreciation to you, the community at large, for your support today. Theres so often this atmosphere of distrust and contentiousness in the cryptocurrency world, but here in the SOILcoin community, theres such a strong spirit of cooperation and congeniality. As my teenager would say: "YOU RAWK"
Ill try to have our updated 2nd Quarter 2016 roadmap written up tonite or early tomorrow. Have a great day! (its sunny and springlike here in cape breton, and even though its been one of the mildest winters in recent memory, its still nice to see the ocean so calm outside my office window and to see the grass in the front yard again)