The Ethereum community can 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 could be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/.
As a person, what do I must do?
Obtain the most recent model of your Ethereum consumer:
What occurs if I don’t take part within the onerous fork?
In case you are utilizing an Ethereum consumer that isn’t up to date for the upcoming onerous fork, your consumer will sync to the pre-fork blockchain as soon as the fork happens. You may be caught on an incompatible chain following the previous 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 must improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the previous guidelines. The decentralized nature of blockchain methods makes a tough fork improve tougher. Laborious forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the group, in addition to with the builders of the varied Ethereum shoppers to ensure that the transition to go easily.
What occurs throughout a tough fork?
After consensus is reached on what adjustments ought to be included in a tough fork, adjustments to the protocol are written into the varied Ethereum shoppers, comparable to geth, Parity, and ethereumJ. The protocol adjustments are activated at a particular block quantity. Any nodes that haven’t been upgraded to the brand new ruleset can be deserted on the previous chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.
Why do we’d like 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 have been processed. The community is at present crammed with 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 fuel payment. Utilizing the ADD operation is much less computationally costly than performing a posh operation comparable to hashing a quantity utilizing SHA256. The attacker carried out a DoS assault by repeatedly calling sure operation codes (opcodes) of their sensible contracts which can be computationally tough for shoppers to course of, however very low-cost so as to add to the community. With the intention to forestall the attacker(s) from persevering with to flood the community with low-priced contracts with excessive computational price, we’re elevating the worth of sure operations.
Why are we doing two onerous forks and what is going to the results be?
The 2 onerous forks every handle completely different issues which have arisen from the assaults. The primary onerous fork is supposed to handle pressing community well being points regarding underpriced operation codes. As described in Ethereum Enchancment Proposal 150, “EIP 150 Laborious Fork,” the primary onerous fork is about to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can regulate the worth of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second onerous fork is anticipated to handle plenty of much less pressing issues comparable to eradicating empty accounts which the attacker used to flood the Ethereum community, and which induced the scale of the blockchain to inflate. The second onerous fork remains to be being mentioned.
After the second onerous fork has been carried out, there’ll seemingly be a “clean-up interval” throughout which period there might proceed to be delays and difficulties processing transactions and syncing till the blockchain state has been absolutely debloated.
How will the EIP 150 onerous fork have an effect on contracts?
See following commentary: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/feedback/57p0bv/a_quick_note_on_how_the_call_gas_cost_increase/
The place can I discover extra technical particulars on what the 2 new onerous forks will change within the protocol?
The respective adjustments to Ethereum protocol are documented within the GitHub repository for Ethereum Enchancment Proposals
The next two EIPs describe the present plans for the upcoming onerous forks:
An enormous due to 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 supply enter, ideas, and contributions to handle stopping the assaults and serving to to enhance the platform.
