ETH celebrates all-time high and announces Casper update

Ethereum Ether reached a new all-time high of $ 381.96 ($ 455) at the time of writing. With a plus of 35.67% a week and 51.19% a month, the cryptocurrency has grown so well. The record time coincides with an update from Casper.

Not only in the area of the course is Ethereum meanwhile record holder. With 500,000 transactions a day, the cryptocurrency handles more transactions than all other cryptocurrencies do together. Today, the trade in the cryptocurrency was also added to bitcoin.de. The planned update Casper is one of the reasons why the network will become even more efficient in the future.

Casper - the spirit of Ethereum

One reason that makes the Ethereum Blockchain and its cryptocurrency sometimes more attractive is the planned implementation of Casper. This is an upgrade designed to transition the Proof of Work validation process to Proof of Stake.

The night part of the proof-of-work process is, above all, that it requires more and more hardware and electricity as the number of transactions increases. The duration of the transaction also suffers from the increasing complexity of the blocks to be calculated, which ultimately has a negative effect on the image of the method.

Proof of Stake, on the other hand, uses far less processing power to find the right block. In contrast to the proof of work, this is more the number of tokens, but also the randomness and consensus formation, which is responsible for a successful mining process (or here Forgen) of the tokens.

Ether's transactions have grown exponentially this year. With the growing interest one must deal accordingly with better handling of the transactions. Therefore, both Buterin and Vlad Zamfir are currently working on Casper, the Ethereum Spirit.

Zamfir's mind

Vlad Zamfir has now released an update to his code on Tuesday, bringing Casper closer to the release. The upgrade follows the recently released "Caspar, the friendly Ghost" protocol. Zamfir focuses mainly on the "correct-by-construction" process, which should simplify consensus finding on the blockchain. With "Casper, the friendly Ghost" within the Nodes over a consensus is to be decided.

Consensus protocols are used by nodes in distributed systems to agree on consensus values. Since networks can always lead to latencies and faulty nodes, this consensus can sometimes be difficult. Due to the latencies, the nodes can sometimes receive different information. In addition, it can happen that these arrive in different orders. With the implementation of the Casper protocol, these problems should now be addressed.

Preparations for Casper

Before Casper can be implemented, however, the next Hard Fork is needed or the second part of Metropolis. The first part went on 16 October as Byzantinum Hard Fork online.

The change from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake is slowly being introduced. First, there will be a mix of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. As announced in Casper Basics, Proof of Work will initially be used to validate blocks.

Proof of Stake, on the other hand, is only used as a kind of "checkpoint" on every 100th block. Thus, in an attack, the spirit of Ethereum would deter the attackers from being able to manipulate the checkpoint. In a 51 -% attack Casper should also help: Casper, who should start his mischief from the beginning of 2018, would take away the stake again.

While Bitcoin sometimes struggles with latencies and slow transactions, Ethereum's new mind seems to dart past the crypto giant. If and how he will react to this (at the moment he seems to be quite indifferent to the course), time will tell. It applies as always: It remains exciting.