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Byzantium Hard Fork Announcement
- Gaelan 9y agoWhat’s this about an “ice age”?
- onestone 9y agoThe Ethereum "ice age" is a mechanism to ensure smooth transition to future planned hard forks. By tweaking the difficulty adjustment formula to artificially increase block times after some time (the so called "difficulty bomb") it makes mining on the old chain unprofitable, and incentivizes everyone to move to the/a new one. The general idea is to prevent extreme conservatism and stagnation w.r.t. hard forks, as we are seeing in Bitcoin.
- sleavey 9y agoSo is this giving the developers the control instead of - as with Bitcoin - the large mining pools? Is that any better?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jstanley 9y agoIncidentally, in Bitcoin, large mining pools do not have control over the consensus rules. It doesn't matter what the miners say, their chain is worthless if people refuse to run it. In Bitcoin, the economic majority decides what is Bitcoin. And when there's a substantial disagreement (e.g. BCC) there's a fork. Large mining pools have no more power to enforce consensus rule changes on others than anybody else does.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoMiners can attack rival chains with the same PoW -- so they do have some extra power over "similar" chains.
- nhhehewr7 9y agoThe former offers far more visibility than the latter for say in the future. So yes, IMO it is. Otherwise private concentration of power will do as it always does: leverage it's monopoly to control the system as a whole. The discussion & development are in the open. The large mining pools can sit at the table and discuss the changes as a part of the community. Or fork off.
- Galaxeblaffer 9y agoAs far as I understand there's a build in ice age/difficulty bomb every year so that clients that don't follow the hard fork will essentially stop working. This incentivizes/forces clients to update and also effectively minimizes the chance of a chain split where some group would just keep running on the old chain. If someone wants to make a chain split, they will have to fork too
- rrobukef 9y agoIt's just as easy to create a second hard fork disabling the bomb if some group wants to keep the old rules.
- DennisP 9y agoSure, but it at least prevents the legacy chain from having an advantage due to inertia.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoYes, but that requires some group to agree on this and to run new code, even if it only removes the difficulty bomb. This is not as trivial as you make it out to be, especially because some individuals that may disagree with the 'main' development branch may also still value the difficulty bomb. It's obvious that this does not prevent disagreement about the protocol, but it greatly affects a fairly large class of disagreements and changes the incentives for a variety of behaviors. It's all game theory, and as such minor changes to the premise of a 'game' can have large impacts on how it plays out. It's not perfect, but I think it is good.
- doctoboggan 9y agoThe ice age is a drastic increase in difficulty that was planned at launch to force the developers to release a proof of stake algorithm. The idea was that no one would want to actually switch to a proof of stake when the time came (miners would lose all their profit, and miners have a lot of power - see current bitcoin situation) To convince early adopters that there would actually be a switch to proof of stake the ice age was conceived. The ice age can be delayed however as we see here (this isn't the first time its been delayed either) Switching from proof of work to proof of stake will probably be hard to pull off without disruption.
- teekert 9y agoHard Forks are the new ICOs. Well, after reading a bit better, this is different, it's unlike BCC and BCG but a change in protocol of the main branch.
- redbeard0x0a 9y agoYes, technically it is a Hard Fork (since that is how the code works). But in practice, it is just a network and feature update to Ethereum.
- tfha 9y agoA hard fork with no replay protection, which means that legacy systems which do not upgrade will be vulnerable to sending too much money to third parties. The ethereum devs have chosen to introduce a vulnerability that forces people to upgrade their systems. 4 days! This announcement was made 4 days before the fork is introduced??? Everyone in the whole ecosystem has 4 days to upgrade it be exposed to a vulnerability. If you are running special code or your own client, you have to adjust it for a new block reward, a new script primitive, a difficulty algorithm, and stuff they are literally calling mathemagic. I don't see how this is responsible development.
- Hermel 9y agoMaybe it is not responsible, but it is certainly agile. :)
- g09980 9y agoFWIW this has been a long while in the making and not a surprise to anyone
- redbeard0x0a 9y agoWe have known about this Hard Fork has been coming for months now. It has been discussed all over the place. This isn't a Hard Fork like the Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash fork (or Ether Classic). This is the expected change to the network to release new features and another step towards PoS.
- cko 9y agoI believe the hard fork was a known thing in the community for a while now. I had wanted to jump on the ETH hype train and almost bought a bunch but these planned forks make the platform seem very “centralized.”
- DennisP 9y agoIn some ways it's less centralized than Bitcoin, since there are multiple independent clients, written in different languages. The teams are just good at cooperating. As with other blockchains, forks don't happen unless users go along with them.
- andrethegiant 9y agoDo you need to do anything if you own ETH?
- g09980 9y agoNo. Node owners will upgrade, including exchanges.
- redbeard0x0a 9y agoUpdate your wallet (if you use Mist or Wallet) before making any transactions. It is an expected fork, basically an upgrade to the network that isn't going to result in a new coin (in practice - technicalities excluded.)
- Kelab 9y agoHopefully we wont see ethereum gold Steem blockchain hardfork 19 times monero hardfork every 6 months both are decentralize no vitalik no problem
- meirelles 9y agoIMHO such planned improvements shouldn't be called hard forks, it's a kind misleading for folks outside cryptocurrencies.
- barkingcat 9y agoBut it is a hard fork, termed that way by the organization that is the custodian of the ethereum network. It is only misleading if people outside cryptocurrencies misrepresent what a hard fork means.
- socrates1024 9y agoEthereum foundation is not the custodian of the network. This is a debatable point, since it's not perfectly clear what that would mean. Ethereum Foundation doesn't own the miners or the validating nodes on the network, and can't control who joins or what software they run. Like other development teams, they can propose and try to drum up support for upgrades, which they've been successful at so far. Detractors of Ethereum would prefer to view the Foundation as having much greater influence over the network, since that would mean it's less centralized. Proponents of Ethereum on the other hand would say Ethereum Foundation's role is similar to that of Bitcoin Core, except the divisiveness hasn't set in yet (or in the case of Ethereum Classic, opposing factions split off before it got bad).
- mccoyspace 9y agoThe Ethereum Foundation owns and controls the trademarks of Ethereum. While they cannot dictate the code the various participants on the network run, they get to explicitly decide which version of the code gets to be called "Ethereum". That's how they maintain control.
- notsofastbuddy 9y agoThere's a good chance that the trademark is no longer enforceable due to their failure to apply enforce it against Ethereum Classic. There has been quite a bit of discussion about this within the community.
- adewinter 9y ago> After the fork, eth.getTransactionReceipt(…) will return a status field. The status field has a value of 0 when a transaction has failed and 1 when the transaction has succeeded. I wonder why they chose to do it the wrong way around...
- tyleraldrich 9y agoIt's a status field, not an error code. 0 = False, 1 = True seems like the right way to do things.
- ulrikrasmussen 9y agoBut why not return a proper Boolean value then?
- tyleraldrich 9y agoWho knows, maybe for legacy code reasons? This seems to be the documentation: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JSON-RPC#eth_gettransactionreceipt https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JSON-RPC#eth_gettransa...
- vvillena 9y agoThats how booleans are encoded in the Ethereum ABI. 0x0 is false, 0x1 is true.
- runeks 9y ago> Delay of the ice age / difficulty bomb by 1 year, and reduction of block reward from 5 to 3 ether I wonder if the planned switch to proof-of-stake is ever going to happen. In any case, what's the point of continuously postponing a pre-programmed difficulty bomb (via a hard for), when miners can just remove this part from the code and continue with that fork if they wish? Because of this, it seems like it doesn't do much difference compared to just switching to PoS via a hard fork whenever it's ready. I mean, if miners really want to continue with PoW, removing those couple of lines, that define the difficulty time bomb, from the Ethereum code surely won't be a problem, right?
- ojr 9y agoyou also need a developer ecosystem, I prefer any solution, that is fast, secure, and has low fees
- SimonPStevens 9y agoThe preprogrammed difficulty bomb is not to stop people who want to intentional stay on the old fork. It's to stop the old fork winning consensus by default due to people who don't actively upgrade. Pushing through protocol changes could be hard if everyone who takes the default action of doing nothing is counted as a vote against any protocol change. I think we see this with bitcoin where change is very conservative and slow because any change has to gain enough support to be actively upgraded by a majority. The difficulty bomb just means that if there is ever disagreement about a protocol change, everyone will have to actively choose a side rather than the 'no' side getting all the non-active default votes. It basically just means that changes can be done faster.
- metroidfan832 9y ago>everyone will have to actively choose a side rather than the 'no' side getting all the non-active default votes No, this just shifts the do-nothings from 'no' to 'yes', as they will have to actively create something that will let them stay with what they currently have. It is technically and morally dangerous because most people aren't technical enough to understand what they are being forced to accept.
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoCan anyone explain what "proof of stake" actually is? My understanding is that it's a virtualized/simulated proof of work system.
- aidenn0 9y ago"Proof of work" proves that you have performed some calculations. "Proof of stake" proves that you have a certain number of tokens. [edit] The whole idea of each is to make sock-puppeting when voting on the truth unprofitable. With the first, you need a near majority of the compute power in the network to have people believe your "lie" with the second you need a near majority of the coins in the network to do so. [edit2] Imagine that banks don't exist, instead everyone writes down every transaction that happens. Then at the end of the day we all get together in the village square and vote on who has what money. This would make it so that no minority of the village can steal money from anyone else. We can't do that with bitcoin &c. because how do you prevent one person from just running a billion bitcoin clients and voting all the money to themselves? So instead bitcoin (very roughly speaking) requires you to prove that you have done some work to get to vote on what the ledger looks like. This is proof of work. If instead it were "one dollar, one vote" that would be proof of stake.
- DennisP 9y agoSo that's basically the original proof-of-stake design. People figured out various ways to attack it (at least in theory, I don't think there's been a successful attack in the wild). Ethereum's version is a bit different: to stake, you have to lock up your ETH for at least four months. Then you have your node start betting your staked ETH on which blocks will be accepted by the network. The blocks which are accepted are the ones that get the most stake-weighted bets. You start with low-confidence votes that won't lose much when you're wrong, see what everybody else does, and progress to high-confidence votes that pay off better when you're right. There's a little bit of inflation plus transaction fees so it's not a zero-sum game, and it all converges on finalized blocks. This is somewhat analogous to mining; if there's more than one finalized block available, miners have to pick one to build on, essentially betting their electricity on which block will be accepted by everyone else. Here's an interesting FAQ: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
- ecesena 9y agoWill this lead to a new coin, or is everybody in agreement this time? Also, what's the plan for ETC, will that also hard fork?
- ecesena 9y agoEdit: I’m getting downvoted and don’t understand why. I’m genuinely trying to get more info, not complaining/joking or anything else.