I think with Eth2 we're possibly seeing a the first attempt to address the Innovator's Dilemma[0] in the blockchain environment.
I've been following the Eth2 progress for a few months now and from the outside it really feels like trying to swap out the engine of a running racecar.
Definitely worth to follow how the Eth1->Eth2 evolution will play out, but I wonder if is not too late for Ethereum while newer kids on the block [1], much more agile due to lack of legacy overhead, have already launched solutions for many of the problems (PoS, sharding, scarcity, WASM smart contract infra, super-high TPS etc.)[2] that Ethereum will be trying to...in the next year or so.
If ethereum was going to be replaced, that would have happened in 2018 with eos.
Network effects proved unbeatable even then, and they are much stronger now.
Prices can go in many directions, but ethereum has the highest adoption of all crypto right now and the lead is only growing. In 2020 it flipped bitcoin in total value transferred and total fees.
Sorry, I haven't found a serious technical source of blockchain/crypto news either and I suspect this is because there are (still) few people that understand cryptos in depth, as well as have time to write news about it.
The vast majority of projects out there are pure speculations and a decent scan through their blog posts, whitepapers and activity on their public repos should be enough to decide if they're building something meaningful (and worth to follow long term) or not.
> The Beacon Chain lets us randomly assign validators to different shards
This is interesting. Cross-shard attacks were a major flaw in shard designs. How is this solved exactly and who is "us" in this sentence? How can the network force a miner/validator to use a specific random shard?
There's a random number generator in the root chain (i.e. the beacon chain) and validators are assigned shortly before validation and may require validation of any random shard. The validator can validate blocks in a "stateless" manner, meaning that they don't have to validate the entire shard but can still validate a single block (which is necessary, because if validators needed data for all shards it would destroy the scaling benefits)
Is that a link to fairy tales from Vitalik?
The fact that "stateless client" is written in Ethereum 2.0 roadmap is an evidence that this project has no future.
