The Ethereum community might be present process a tough fork at block quantity 2463000, which is able to seemingly happen between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer might be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/.
As a person, what do I have to do?
Obtain the newest model of your Ethereum shopper:
What occurs if I don’t take part within the laborious fork?
In case you are utilizing an Ethereum shopper that isn’t up to date for the upcoming laborious fork, your shopper will sync to the pre-fork blockchain as soon as the fork happens. You can be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines and you’ll be unable to ship ether or function on the post-fork Ethereum community.
What’s a tough fork in Ethereum-land?
A tough fork is a change to the underlying Ethereum protocol, creating new guidelines to enhance the system. All Ethereum shoppers have to improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines. The decentralized nature of blockchain methods makes a tough fork improve harder. Arduous forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the group, in addition to with the builders of the assorted Ethereum shoppers to ensure that the transition to go easily.
What occurs throughout a tough fork?
After consensus is reached on what modifications needs to be included in a tough fork, modifications to the protocol are written into the assorted Ethereum shoppers, resembling geth, Parity, and ethereumJ. The protocol modifications are activated at a particular block quantity. Any nodes that haven’t been upgraded to the brand new ruleset might be deserted on the outdated chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.
Why do we want a tough fork?
Since September 18th (UTC), the Ethereum community has been underneath assault by an individual or group leading to massive delays earlier than transactions had been processed. The community is at the moment full of pending transactions which is inflicting customers delays in processing their transactions. You possibly can consider this as a denial of service (DoS) assault on the Ethereum blockchain.
Each operation that an Ethereum contract performs on the community is given a value or gasoline price. Utilizing the ADD operation is much less computationally costly than performing a posh operation resembling hashing a quantity utilizing SHA256. The attacker carried out a DoS assault by repeatedly calling sure operation codes (opcodes) of their good contracts which can be computationally troublesome for shoppers to course of, however very low-cost so as to add to the community. As a way to stop the attacker(s) from persevering with to flood the community with low-priced contracts with excessive computational price, we’re elevating the value of sure operations.
Why are we doing two laborious forks and what’s going to the results be?
The 2 laborious forks every handle totally different issues which have arisen from the assaults. The primary laborious fork is supposed to handle pressing community well being points regarding underpriced operation codes. As described in Ethereum Enchancment Proposal 150, “EIP 150 Arduous Fork,” the primary laborious fork is ready to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can modify the value of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second laborious fork is predicted to handle numerous much less pressing issues resembling eradicating empty accounts which the attacker used to flood the Ethereum community, and which brought on the scale of the blockchain to inflate. The second laborious fork continues to be being mentioned.
After the second laborious fork has been carried out, there’ll seemingly be a “clean-up interval” throughout which period there could proceed to be delays and difficulties processing transactions and syncing till the blockchain state has been totally debloated.
How will the EIP 150 laborious fork have an effect on contracts?
See following commentary: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/57p0bv/a_quick_note_on_how_the_call_gas_cost_increase/
The place can I discover extra technical particulars on what the 2 new laborious forks will change within the protocol?
The respective modifications to Ethereum protocol are documented within the GitHub repository for Ethereum Improvement Proposals
The next two EIPs describe the present plans for the upcoming laborious forks:
A giant because of the Ethereum group for his or her endurance and understanding, and to all Ethereum builders throughout all shoppers and platforms who got here collectively to offer enter, ideas, and contributions to handle stopping the assaults and serving to to enhance the platform.
