2020-02-18 Besu Contributor Call Notes

Recording of call - https://consensys.zoom.us/rec/share/-MoqPu2uq31LYLfjzkbTU695IsfaT6a8hiIX8_EKzkZI5_dD51ilQUFRK4dlFt9h?startTime=1581987869000

Housekeeping

General Announcements

  • Conferences
    • ETHDenver
      • Successful conference
      • DApp focused and so no Besu bounty was taken
      • Working towards stateless Ethereum
    • ETHCC is still coming
    • Hyperledger Global Forum
      • We are still on given the travel restrictions, but watch this space

Release Updates

  • 1.3.9
    • ETC release for fork support
  • 1.4RC
    • Going to have an RC2 this week, with full release planned for next week
    • Everything planned should be in

Work updates

  • The ETC migration from ethash to keccak256 is to level the ASIC playing field, rather than trying to keep being ASIC resistant
  • The roadmap page will be updated shortly with the plans for 1.5
    • Performance improvements
    • Improvements to the private state support
    • Beam sync, especially important as a first step to being a stateless client
    • Mining support improvements
      • Transaction pool management

Other Business

  • N/A

Open Forum

  • Fast vs Full sync from Aditya Singh
    • Security guarantees are about the same if you validate the pivot block
    • Ethereum is different to Bitcoin in that each block includes the root hash from a petricia tree of the unspent transactions which allows us to start in the middle