The Ethereum community will likely be present process a tough fork at block quantity 2463000, which can possible happen between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer may be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/.
As a person, what do I have to do?
Obtain the newest model of your Ethereum consumer:
What occurs if I don’t take part within the arduous fork?
In case you are utilizing an Ethereum consumer that isn’t up to date for the upcoming arduous fork, your consumer will sync to the pre-fork blockchain as soon as the fork happens. You’ll 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 have to improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the previous guidelines. The decentralized nature of blockchain techniques makes a tough fork improve tougher. Onerous forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the neighborhood, 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 adjustments must be included in a tough fork, adjustments to the protocol are written into the assorted Ethereum shoppers, reminiscent of 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 will likely be deserted on the previous chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.
Why do we want a tough fork?
Since September 18th (UTC), the Ethereum community has been below assault by an individual or group leading to massive delays earlier than transactions had 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 worth or gasoline charge. Utilizing the ADD operation is much less computationally costly than performing a posh 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 are 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 worth of sure operations.
Why are we doing two arduous forks and what’s going to the results be?
The 2 arduous forks every handle completely different issues which have arisen from the assaults. The primary arduous 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 arduous fork is about to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can alter the worth of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second arduous fork is anticipated to deal with quite a lot of much less pressing issues reminiscent of 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 arduous fork remains to be being mentioned.
After the second arduous fork has been applied, there’ll possible 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 totally debloated.
How will the EIP 150 arduous 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 arduous 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 arduous forks:
An enormous because of the Ethereum neighborhood for his or her persistence and understanding, and to all Ethereum builders throughout all shoppers 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.