2018-0003: Hardfork Meta: WebAssembly

[ellaismer]

(Rendered)

This proposes to enable WebAssembly scripting at block number 2,000,000.

[ellaismer]

Note that one important issue with this hard fork is that we are most likely to discontinue multi-geth and go-ellaism support. Parity may be the only full node implementation that we're able to support. This is just due to limited manpower and we need to make sure people using the network are able to switch to Parity.

[ellaismer]

We're having a small opinion poll created using CarbonVote. Note that we're not doing a plurality vote here. The voting is not to divide the community, but to bound it together. The intention is that everyone can learn about other people's opinion, and we can collectively decide a path forward that's beneficial for most people. The vote is non-binding. Core devs and community members may call off the hard fork if it turned out to be contentious, or may carry on the hard fork even if it does not have majority vote, but it is up to everyone whether to follow them or not. The vote poll is open from April 30, 2018 till the date of hard fork.

The vote is about Do you support enabling WebAssembly scripting as described in 2018-0003?. To cast your vote:

• Yes: Send a zero value transaction to address 0x650470b35afa333e445b7d64a5c870cfab8261d6
• No: Send a zero value transaction to address 0xd27b44389788db771c25b08fc267c8a11fdf8898

If you changed your opinion after voting, simply cast a new vote by sending another transaction, and your previous vote will be overwritten.

[mohsenghajar]

An advantage Ellaism enjoys has been the possibility of using Ethereum developers' codes and implementations. If you change this from solidity to webassembly, does it mean we will be on our own or we can still use Ethereum stuff? Especially since great things such as sharing and plasma are in the pipeline.

[ellaismer]

@mohsenghajar We can still use Ethereum stuff. WebAssembly is added to Ellaism. We don't remove anything, so all existing EVM environments continue to work as they are.

The version we proposed to add here is "pwasm" (a little bit different compared with eWASM, but they all mostly run a restricted version of vanilla WASM with metering). So in addition to reusing Ethereum ecosystem's code, with this, we can also reuse many of the development in the wider WebAssembly community.

[mohsenghajar]

Also one thing that can greatly help Ellaism is development of game dapps (such as cryptokitties) which have become too slow and expensive to run on Ethereum.