The Ethereum community will probably 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 could be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/.
As a consumer, what do I must do?
Obtain the most recent model of your Ethereum shopper:
What occurs if I don’t take part within the arduous fork?
In case you are utilizing an Ethereum shopper that’s not up to date for the upcoming arduous fork, your shopper 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 You may be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines and you can be unable to ship ether or function on the post-fork Ethereum community.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Ethereum shoppers must improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines.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 techniques makes a tough fork improve harder. Arduous 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, akin 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 Any nodes that haven’t been upgraded to the brand new ruleset will probably be deserted on the outdated chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.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 beneath assault by an individual or group leading to massive delays earlier than transactions have been processed. The community is at the moment crammed with pending transactions which is inflicting customers delays in processing their transactions. You’ll be able to 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 fancy operation akin 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 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 consequences be?
The 2 arduous forks every deal with totally 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 Arduous Fork,” the primary arduous fork is ready to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can regulate the worth of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second arduous fork is predicted to deal with a variety of much less pressing issues akin to eradicating empty accounts which the attacker used to flood the Ethereum community, and which brought about the scale of the blockchain to inflate. The second arduous fork continues to be being mentioned.
After the second arduous fork has been carried out, there’ll possible 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 absolutely 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:
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 offer enter, ideas, and contributions to deal with stopping the assaults and serving to to enhance the platform.