AdLunam

The Ethereum network will undergo a hard fork at the block number 2463,000, which will probably occur between 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. UTC on Tuesday October 18, 2016. https://fork.codestract.io/.

As a user, what should I do?

Download the latest version of your Ethereum client:

What happens if I don’t participate in the hard fork?

If you use an Ethereum customer who is not updated for the next fork, your customer will synchronize with the blockchain before the sheath once the fork is. You will be stuck on an incompatible channel by following the old rules and you will not be able to send ether or operate on the Ethereum post-Fourré network.

What is a fork last in Ethereum-Land?

A hard fork is a change in the underlying Ethereum protocol, creating new rules to improve the system. All Ethereum customers must upgrade; Otherwise, they will be stuck on an incompatible channel by following the old rules. The decentralized nature of blockchain systems makes a difficult upgrade more difficult fork. The hard forks in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the community, as well as with the developers of the different Ethereum customers so that the transition is going well.

What’s going on during a hard fork?

Once the consensus is reached on the modifications which should be included in a hard fork, the changes in the protocol are written in the various Ethereum customers, such as Geth, Parity and Ethereumj. The protocol changes are activated to a specific block number. All the nodes that have not been upgraded to the new set of rules will be abandoned on the old chain where the previous rules continue to exist.

Why do we need a hard fork?

Since September 18 (UTC), the Ethereum network has been attacked by a person or a group leading to great delays before the treatment of transactions. The network is currently filled with pending transactions, which causes user delays in processing their transactions. You can consider this as a service of service denial (back) on the Ethereum blockchain.

Each operation that an Ethereum contract performs on the network receives a price or gas costs. The use of the Add operation is less expensive in calculation than to carry out a complex operation such as the hash of a number using SHA256. The attacker has carried out a back attack by repeatedly calling certain operating codes (OPCODES) in their intelligent contracts which are difficult to deal with by the calculation, but very cheap to add to the network. In order to prevent the attacker from continuing to flood the network with low -cost contracts with a high calculation cost, we increase the price of certain operations.

Why do we make two hard forks and what will be the effects?

The two hard forks solve each of the different problems from attacks. The first hard fork is intended to solve the health problems of urgent networks concerning under-prix operating codes. As described in Ethereum Improvement Proposition 150, “EIP 150 Hard Fork”, the first hard fork should occur at the block number 2463000 and will adjust the price of sub-prix opcodes involved in the attack. The second fork is expected to tackle a number of less urgent questions such as the deletion of empty accounts that the attacker used to flood the Ethereum network and which caused the blockchain swelling. The second last fork is still being discussed.

After the implementation of the second difficult fork, there will probably be a “cleaning period” during which he could continue to be delays and difficulties in processing transactions and synchronization until the state of the blockchain is completely unlocked.

How will the EIP 150 fork affect contracts?

See the following comments:

Where can I find more technical details on what the two new hard forks will change in the protocol?

The respective modifications of the Ethereum protocol are documented in the Github repository for Ethereum improvement proposals
The following two EIPs describe the current plans for the next hard forks:

A big thank you to the Ethereum community for their patience and understanding, and to all the developers of Ethereum of all the customers and platforms which have met to provide comments, thoughts and contributions to tackle attacks and to help improve the platform.