Dubhe would be my strong preference for star name after Capella: it’s the traditional/formal name for Alpha Ursae Majoris, also known as the “Big Dipper” and “Great Bear”: the ideal name to close a bear market with.
Electra would then be a great follow-up star name: Electra is a star in the Taurus constellation (bull after bear ).
Since consensus layer is the common ground, and execution is like built environment on top of it, perhaps a natural feature of the city…so Shanghai might go with river Huangpu.
Or if the star is common ground natural object, the constellation becomes like the city. So Capella would go with Auriga.
Another option would be to link cities to stars using astrology somehow.
I wanted emojis as a short reference to the name for the memeability, on that basis I thought about animals or the zodiac.
@protolambda’s name blending feels like a winning concept.
It allows the continued Devcon city names (or notable Ethereum cities) for EL upgrades and alphabetical star names for CL upgrades, and nicely links them.
We also can use it now and don’t have to wait for the upgrade after Shapella.
We can use an emoji which fits either the name or the main feature(s) of the upgrade.
How about gods names from the Greco-Roman pantheon, using the Greek and Roman name for EL and CL? The god’s attribute can be the high-level friendly name. So the Dyonisius/Bacchus update would be affectionately called the Wine one, the Jupiter/Zeus Thunder, and so forth.
I like the idea of tying the EL and CL upgrade names together, but I think we should leave the gods to the gods. My concern is offending believers and the strong European cultural focus.
EL upgrades continuing to use Devcon (and other prominent Ethereum cities) city names would be representative of Ethereum culture & history, though we need to avoid flags/nationalism.
I like this proposal the most. We should decide a name of which layer to use as the name for the whole thing in the case of two-layer HF. And then keep the same notation as we use to day for spec docs, e.g. Capella for CL, Shanghai for Engine API specs.
Using a mixed name is a good one but I don’t like it because everyone will have to keep three names in mind when talking about two-layer HF.
Note that we will run out of Devcon city names in case of >1 HF per year. Devcons to be happening in locations defined by EL’s HF names is one of potential solutions to this problem.
Please can we just stick with what we have for the execution and consensus layers? We already have a history of past names and a plan for future names, so any change will cause disruption and add to the technical debt of the ecosystem.
Naming things is hard, because we don’t know what the future brings so cannot pick something that will work well with future changes (Ethereum is a good example of this). But consistency brings its own benefits, and reduces the mental load when coming in to the Ethereum space. Taking the consensus layer as an example, we are now on a path “A,B,C,…” for each hard fork, which makes it very easy for someone coming in to the space to know the ordering of the hard forks. Execution layer requires a bit of tribal knowledge, but that is now a given and not going to change so the best we can do is not to increase their burden but having multiple systems that happen at different points in time.
As for having a user-facing name for the upgrades, I maintain that the best solution here is to talk about the execution layer name and not the consensus layer. Anything that is consensus layer-specific is likely to only matter to validators, and they are generally speaking more aware of the difference between the layers and understanding of what is activated when (the BLS to execution change operations are a good example of this). If we consider users to be those that may generate execution layer transactions, or benefit from execution layer transactions, then the thing they care about is upgrades in the execution layer so that it is what we should be talking about.
Kindly birthday note beacon chain, and the community!
conversations? of a posthumous naming scheme layer. Examples; Hawking,
Name is identity, whether we imagine a planet, city or else. In my mind, I compare updates/upgrades to historical artworks. “Pink. Election” draws pictures of our Consciousness. However; the term and the story behind delegate curiosity via different tenses.
Given that @protolambda is letting go of Duhbe (due to some people having difficulty spelling), it looks like Deneb might be the default winner for the D-starname.
Could we perhaps make our own images and get them standardized in unicode? This is partially a joke, and partially a serious proposition.
Alternatively, maybe we can get the Ethereum logo standardized in unicode, and then we can add new ZWJ emoji sequences that, say, combine the Ethereum logo and the owl/swan.
It feels like we’ve naturally converged towards this proposal, with people using Shapella (and now Dencun) more and more. Another property that’s nice for this is you can tell by looking at the name whether it’s a CL/EL-only upgrade (star or city) vs. a CL+EL upgrade (combined name).
).
Shapella (Shanghai + Capella)
Canubhe (Cancun + Duhbe)
Practra (Prague + Electra)
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Caneb (Cancun + Deneb)