(The picture comes from the Internet)
1
Big downtime
At around 4:30 pm on the 11th (Beijing time, the same below), many people suddenly found that their Ethereum wallet metamask was not working well. Even the uniswap and all Ethereum dApps are not available. Binance's Ethereum deposit and withdrawal are suspended for maintenance. Some projects are preparing to launch on uniswap to add liquidity, but they are forced to change their plans. Everyone soon discovered that the API interface of the so-called RPC service provider infura was not easy to use. When infura is hung up, metamask is hung up. When metamask is dead, uniswap (and all Ethereum dApps) can no longer be used.
At about 5:30 in the afternoon, Binance released a message saying that it was found that Ethereum was suspected of forking at block height 11234873. The block hash of the block explorer blockchair and etherscan displayed differently, so Binance The deposit and withdrawal channels of Ethereum and all ERC20 tokens on Ethereum were urgently closed.
Around 6 pm, Infura said it was repairing it.
Nearly 7 pm, blockchair chief developer Nikita Zhavoronkov tweeted that it was because Ethereum quietly fixed a bug that had existed for more than 2 years in a certain update, which caused the old version of the Ethereum client to be blocked at block 11234873. Stuck, causing the split of the Ethereum blockchain.
Blockchair, infura, etc. did not upgrade the latest Ethereum client, which resulted in being stuck.
However, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, denied that there was a fork in the Ethereum network. It's just that the old version that hasn't been upgraded for a long time encountered a problem, just upgrade it.
Around 7:30 in the evening, the Infura announcement explained that the cause of the accident was that the go-ethereum client version used by Infura was older (this problem exists in both 1.9.9 and 1.9.13), which caused serious problems at block height 11234873. Consensus issue. This problem does not exist in 1.9.19 and later versions.
Around 10:30 in the evening, Infura stated that the restoration has been completed. So far, the failure caused a total of 6 hours and 15 minutes of service downtime (according to the statistics report of status.infura.io).
2
Market Reaction
For this technical failure, the secondary market's response was rather flat. Ethereum closed up 4.23% ($461.96) throughout the day. UNI closed up 6.3% throughout the day ($3.06).
Bitcoin developers did not give up the opportunity to mock Ethereum and its founder Vitalik. Developer James Lopp tweeted: It only takes three words to arouse the fear in the hearts of Ethereum users: infura is down (infura is down). And the developer Jimmy Song, who has always been known for being daring and daring to spray, tweeted: Isn't it because the large-scale consensus failure of Ethereum 1.0 has provided Vitalik with great convenience in pushing people to Ethereum 2.0? And once again, never attribute things that can be explained incompetently to deliberate. I tend to be incompetent, although I am happy to admit that I was wrong.
However, the ethereum community has not lost much of Bitcoin. For example, Nikita Zhavoronkov, the lead developer of the blockchair mentioned above, has recently tweeted and bombarded Bitcoin and Lightning Network. He once said: The Lightning Network has been developed for 5 years, and the result is completely centralized without any practical use. It has completely failed, but anyone with half of the brain can foresee this. Also known as: The best time to expel Bitcoin Core developers was 4 years ago, when they refused to increase the block size and everyone wanted to increase it. The next best time is now.
3
A long way to go
I hope that this major downtime can sound a wake-up call to the Ethereum ecosystem and the entire blockchain industry, that is, the current blockchain projects, even top projects like Ethereum, still have many centralized, The risk point of what Satoshi Nakamoto called the "single point of failure" problem. These risk points, do not know when a thunder will explode, are the "Achilles heel" of the entire project ecology. According to Murphy's law, as long as there is a possibility of a thunderstorm, no matter how small the risk is, as long as the time is long enough, there will be a thunderstorm one day.
Ethereum, which has a very high degree of node decentralization, and many applications based on Ethereum, its availability is actually tied to a centralized Internet API service. This makes Internet friends and friends from all walks of life who have listened to blockchain people nagging about "decentralization" have greater doubts about whether the blockchain will work.
This centralized Internet architecture not only weakens decentralization, but also weakens censorship resistance (the API provider can block a user at any time), and there is no privacy protection (associating the address with your identity). But this kind of Internet-style architecture is the simplest, effective and easy to popularize.
And these are the problems that need to be solved in Satoshi Nakamoto's vision. Today, these problems have not been completely resolved even with Bitcoin (the SPV light wallet has not yet had a good enough solution to balance efficiency and privacy), let alone other public chains.
The task is heavy, and the road is long and hindered. Keep going, blockchain people!
(Public account: Liu Jiaolian)