Thank you for questions and support expressed during the presentation yesterday! Two points that were highlighted:
1. Identify potential issues with deployed contracts relying on the slot time. We will have more on this soon, doing joint work with
@SourcifyEth, currently no strong blocker encountered with a few important contracts that we have surveyed.
2. Understand costs and benefits, as some pointed out that a moderate decrease from 12 to 10 seconds, our Hegotá anchor target, may not be worth the work. I'd reiterate here that getting started with slot time decreases is the hard part, that we need to cross in order to iterate towards shorter and shorter slot times. 12 to 10 seconds remains quite significant, and is immediately beneficial to all users of Ethereum at once.
Hence, it appears most valuable to get started asap, and enjoy a decrease in Hegotá. And then potentially more decreases in subsequent hard forks, as decoupled consensus comes online and zk/pq move forward.
Hegotá may well be the last time before long where we can get started with slot time decreases. Many, myself included, wish to see decoupled consensus deployed in the fork following Hegotá, to obtain faster finality. However, bundling a slot time change with decoupled consensus appears unreasonable.
Meaning: We either commit to staying at 12 seconds for the next two years minimum, or land 10 seconds in ~a year in Hegotá, and possibly less than 10 seconds by the year after. This is why it is in my view critical to move ahead with quick slots in Hegotá.
There is no blocker other than prioritisation, hence the importance of continuing to express support for the value of this EIP.
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A special shout-out too to
@CarlBeek who has authored the quick slots EIP and kept the work of slot time decreases going. We'll be updating the EIP to reflect the new anchor target of 10 seconds, following comments to that effect in the ACD chat.
You can find the presentation and questions on Forkcast. Thank you again to all for the good discussion!
forkcast.org/calls/acdc/184/…