The Ethereum community can be present process a tough fork at block quantity 2463000, which can probably 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 consumer, what do I must do?
Obtain the most recent model of your Ethereum consumer:
What occurs if I don’t take part within the exhausting fork?
In case you are utilizing an Ethereum consumer that isn’t up to date for the upcoming exhausting fork, your consumer 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 You can be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines and you’ll be unable to ship ether or function on the post-fork Ethereum community.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Ethereum purchasers must improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines. The decentralized nature of blockchain techniques makes a tough fork improve harder. Onerous forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the group, in addition to with the builders of the varied Ethereum purchasers to ensure that the transition to go easily.
What occurs throughout a tough fork?
After consensus is reached on what adjustments needs to be included in a tough fork, adjustments to the protocol are written into the varied Ethereum purchasers, 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 Any nodes that haven’t been upgraded to the brand new ruleset can be deserted on the outdated chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.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 giant delays earlier than transactions have 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 worth 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 good contracts which might be computationally troublesome for purchasers to course of, however very low cost so as to add to the community. To be able to forestall the attacker(s) from persevering with to flood the community with low-priced contracts with excessive computational value, we’re elevating the worth of sure operations.
Why are we doing two exhausting forks and what is going to the results be?
The 2 exhausting forks every deal with completely different issues which have arisen from the assaults. The primary exhausting fork is supposed to deal with pressing community well being points regarding underpriced operation codes. As described in Ethereum Enchancment Proposal 150, “EIP 150 Onerous Fork,” the primary exhausting fork is ready to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can modify the worth of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second exhausting fork is anticipated to deal with a variety of much less pressing issues comparable to eradicating empty accounts which the attacker used to flood the Ethereum community, and which brought on the dimensions of the blockchain to inflate. The second exhausting fork remains to be being mentioned.
After the second exhausting fork has been applied, there’ll probably 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 exhausting 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 exhausting forks will change within the protocol?
The respective adjustments to Ethereum protocol are documented within the GitHub repository for Ethereum Improvement Proposals
The next two EIPs describe the present plans for the upcoming exhausting forks:
An enormous because of the Ethereum group for his or her persistence and understanding, and to all Ethereum builders throughout all purchasers and platforms who got here collectively to supply enter, ideas, and contributions to deal with stopping the assaults and serving to to enhance the platform.
