The Ethereum community might be present process a tough fork at block quantity 2463000, which is able to probably happen between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer will be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/.
As a person, what do I must do?
Obtain the most recent model of your Ethereum shopper:
What occurs if I don’t take part within the onerous fork?
If you’re utilizing an Ethereum shopper that’s not up to date for the upcoming onerous fork, your shopper will sync to the pre-fork blockchain as soon as the fork happens. You’ll be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines and you may be unable to ship ether or function on the post-fork Ethereum community.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Ethereum purchasers must improve; in any other case they are going to be caught on an incompatible chain following the outdated guidelines.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 methods makes a tough fork improve tougher. Arduous forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the group, in addition to with the builders of the assorted Ethereum purchasers to ensure that the transition to go easily.
What occurs throughout a tough fork?
After consensus is reached on what modifications must be included in a tough fork, modifications to the protocol are written into the assorted Ethereum purchasers, corresponding to geth, Parity, and ethereumJ. The protocol modifications are activated at a particular block quantity. Any nodes that haven’t been upgraded to the brand new ruleset might be deserted on the outdated chain the place the earlier guidelines live on.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 massive delays earlier than transactions had been processed. The community is presently 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 value or fuel charge. Utilizing the ADD operation is much less computationally costly than performing a fancy operation corresponding 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 troublesome for purchasers 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 value of sure operations.
Why are we doing two onerous forks and what’s going to the results be?
The 2 onerous forks every handle totally different issues which have arisen from the assaults. The primary onerous 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 onerous fork is about to happen at block quantity 2463000 and can regulate the value of underpriced opcodes concerned within the assault. The second onerous fork is anticipated to deal with quite a few much less pressing issues corresponding 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 onerous fork remains to be being mentioned.
After the second onerous fork has been carried out, 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 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 modifications 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 purchasers 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.
