The Ethereum community will probably 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 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 You may be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines and you’ll be unable to ship ether or function on the post-fork Ethereum community.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Ethereum shoppers must improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines.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 programs makes a tough fork improve tougher. Arduous forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the neighborhood, 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 modifications ought to be included in a tough fork, modifications to the protocol are written into the varied Ethereum shoppers, reminiscent of geth, Parity, and ethereumJ. The protocol modifications are activated at a selected block quantity. Any nodes that haven’t been upgraded to the brand new ruleset will probably be deserted on the outdated chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.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 beneath assault by an individual or group leading to giant delays earlier than transactions have been processed. The community is presently 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 gasoline payment. Utilizing the ADD operation is much less computationally costly than performing a fancy operation reminiscent of 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 troublesome for shoppers to course of, however very low cost so as to add to the community. In an effort to stop the attacker(s) from persevering with to flood the community with low-priced contracts with excessive computational value, we’re elevating the value of sure operations.
Why are we doing two exhausting forks and what is going to the consequences be?
The 2 exhausting forks every handle totally different issues which have arisen from the assaults. The primary exhausting 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 exhausting fork is about to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can alter the value of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second exhausting fork is predicted to handle plenty of much less pressing issues reminiscent of eradicating empty accounts which the attacker used to flood the Ethereum community, and which precipitated the scale of the blockchain to inflate. The second exhausting fork remains to be being mentioned.
After the second exhausting fork has been carried out, there’ll seemingly be a “clean-up interval” throughout which era there could proceed to be delays and difficulties processing transactions and syncing till the blockchain state has been absolutely 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 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 exhausting forks:
A giant due to the Ethereum neighborhood 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.
