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Special thanks to Gavin Wood for prompting my interest into abstraction improvements, and Martin Becze, Vlad Zamfir and Dominic Williams for ongoing discussions.<\/em><\/p>\n For a long time we have been public about our plans to continue improving the Ethereum protocol over time and our long development roadmap, learning from our mistakes that we either did not have the opportunity to fix in time for 1.0 or only realized after the fact. However, the Ethereum protocol development cycle has started up once again, with a Homestead release coming very soon, and us quietly starting to develop proof-of-concepts for the largest milestone that we had placed for ourselves in our development roadmap<\/a>: Serenity.<\/p>\n Serenity is intended to have two major feature sets: abstraction, a concept that I initially expanded on in this blog post here<\/a>, and Casper, our security-deposit-based proof of stake algorithm. Additionally, we are exploring the idea of adding at least the scaffolding that will allow for the smooth deployment over time of our scalability<\/a> proposals<\/a>, and at the same time completely resolve parallelizability concerns brought up here<\/a> – an instant very large gain for private blockchain instances of Ethereum with nodes being run in massively multi-core dedicated servers, and even the public chain may see a 2-5x improvement in scalability. Over the past few months, research on Casper and formalization of scalability and abstraction (eg. with EIP 101<\/a>) have been progressing at a rapid pace between myself, Vlad Zamfir, Lucius Greg Meredith and a few others, and now I am happy to announce that the first proof of concept release for Serenity, albeit in a very limited form suitable only for testing, is now available<\/a>.<\/p>\n The PoC can be run by going into the ethereum<\/span> directory and running python test.py<\/span> (make sure to download and install the latest Serpent from https:\/\/github.com\/ethereum\/serpent<\/a>, develop branch<\/b>); if the output looks something like this then you are fine:<\/p>\n This is a simulation of 13 nodes running the Casper+Serenity protocol at a 5-second block time; this is fairly close to the upper limit of what the client can handle at the moment, though note that (i) this is python, and C++ and Go will likely show much higher performance, and (ii) this is all nodes running on one computer at the same time, so in a more “normal” environment it means you can expect python Casper to be able to handle at least ~169 nodes (though, on the other hand, we want consensus overhead to be much less than 100% of CPU time, so these two caveats combined do NOT mean that you should expect to see Casper running with thousands of nodes!). If your computer is too slow to handle the 13 nodes, try python test.py 10<\/span> to run the simulation with 10 nodes instead (or python test.py 7<\/span> for 7 nodes, etc). Of course, research on improving Casper’s efficiency, though likely at the cost of somewhat slower convergence to finality, is still continuing, and these problems should reduce over time. The network.py<\/span> file simulates a basic P2P network interface; future work will involve swapping this out for actual computers running on a real network.<\/p>\n The code is split up into several main files as follows:<\/p>\n For this article, we will focus on the abstraction features and so serenity_blocks.py<\/span>, ecdsa_accounts.py<\/span> and serenity_transactions.py<\/span> are most critical; for the next article discussing Casper in Serenity, casper.se.py<\/span> and bet.py<\/span> will be a primary focus.<\/p>\nvub@vub-ThinkPad-X250 15:01:03 serenity\/ethereum: python test.py\nREVERTING 940534 gas from account 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 to account 0x98c78be58d729dcdc3de9efb3428820990e4e3bf with data 0x\nWarning (file \"casper.se.py\", line 74, char 0): Warning: function return type inconsistent!\nRunning with 13 maximum nodes\nWarning (file \"casper.se.py\", line 74, char 0): Warning: function return type inconsistent!\nWarning (file \"casper.se.py\", line 74, char 0): Warning: function return type inconsistent!\nLength of validation code: 57\nLength of account code: 0\nJoined with index 0\nLength of validation code: 57\nLength of account code: 0\nJoined with index 1\nLength of validation code: 57\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
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