The Ethereum community can be present process a tough fork at block quantity 2,675,000, which is able to possible happen between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC on Tuesday, November 22, 2016. A countdown timer will be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/. The Morden check community can be present process a tough fork at block #1,885,000.
As a consumer, what do I must do?
Obtain the newest model of your Ethereum consumer:
What occurs if I don’t replace my consumer?
In case you are utilizing an Ethereum consumer that’s not up to date for the upcoming exhausting fork, your consumer will sync to the pre-fork blockchain as soon as the fork happens. You may be caught on an incompatible chain following the previous guidelines and you may be unable to ship ether or function on the post-fork Ethereum community.
Importantly, in case your consumer isn’t up to date, it additionally implies that any transactions you make will nonetheless be vulnerable to replay assaults.
What if I’m utilizing an online or cell Ethereum pockets like MyEtherWallet or Jaxx?
Ethereum web sites and cell purposes that will let you retailer ether and/or make transactions are working their very own Ethereum consumer infrastructure to facilitate their companies. Usually, you don’t want to do something in case you use a 3rd social gathering internet based mostly or cell Ethereum pockets. Nonetheless, it’s best to nonetheless test along with your internet or cell Ethereum pockets supplier to see what actions they’re taking to replace for the exhausting fork and if they’re asking their customers to take different steps.
Specifically, it’s best to be certain that transactions are generated with the brand new replay-protected EIP 155 scheme.
What do I do if my Ethereum consumer is having bother syncing to the blockchain?
Be sure to have downloaded the newest model of your Ethereum consumer.
Why are we proposing to exhausting fork the community?
“Spurious Dragon” is the second exhausting fork of the two-round exhausting fork response to the DoS assaults on the Ethereum community in September and October. The earlier exhausting fork (a.ok.a “Tangerine Whistle”) addressed immediate network health issues due to the attacks. The upcoming exhausting fork addresses necessary however much less urgent issues resembling additional tuning opcode pricing to forestall future assaults on the community, enabling “debloat” of the blockchain state, and including replay assault safety.
What adjustments are part of this tough fork?
The next Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) describe the protocol adjustments applied on this exhausting fork.
- EIP 155: Replay attack protection – prevents transactions from one Ethereum chain from being rebroadcasted on another chain. For instance: For those who ship 150 check ether to somebody from the Morden testnet, that very same transaction can’t be replayed on the primary Ethereum chain. Necessary observe: EIP 155 is backwards suitable, so transactions generated with the “pre-Spurious-Dragon” format will nonetheless be accepted. Nonetheless, to make sure you are protected towards replay assaults, you’ll nonetheless want to make use of a pockets resolution that implements EIP 155.
Remember that this backwards compatibility additionally implies that transactions created from different Ethereum based mostly blockchains that haven’t applied EIP 155 (resembling Ethereum Traditional) can nonetheless be replayed on the primary Ethereum chain. - EIP 160: EXP cost increase – adjusts the worth of `EXP` opcode so it balances the worth of `EXP` with the computational complexity of the operation, basically making it tougher to decelerate the community by way of computationally costly contract operations.
- EIP 161: State trie clearing – makes it doable to take away numerous empty accounts that had been put within the state at very low price on account of earlier DoS assaults. With this EIP, ’empty’ accounts are faraway from the state each time ‘touched’ by one other transaction. Elimination of the empty accounts drastically reduces blockchain state measurement, which is able to present consumer optimizations resembling sooner sync instances. The precise removing course of will start after the fork by systematically performing `CALL` to the empty accounts that had been created by the assaults.
- EIP 170: Contract code size limit – adjustments the utmost code measurement {that a} contract on the blockchain can have. This replace prevents an assault situation the place massive items of account code will be accessed repeatedly at a hard and fast gasoline price. The utmost measurement has been set to 24576 bytes, which is bigger than any at present deployed contract.
DISCLAIMER
That is an emergent and evolving extremely technical area. For those who select to implement the suggestions on this put up and proceed to take part, it’s best to be sure you perceive the way it impacts you. It’s best to perceive that there are dangers concerned together with however not restricted to dangers like sudden bugs. By selecting to implement these suggestions, you alone assume the dangers of the implications.
