Editor | Lu Xiaomingcoinswitchand cointelegraph）

Editor | Lu Xiaoming

The Constantinople fork is the most important topic in the blockchain field recently. Odaily has compiled everything you need to know.

In the most recent cryptocurrency market capitalization rankings, the competition for the number two spot appears to be fierce. After Ripple's short-lived counterattack, Ethereum is now back in the "second spot", and it is also trying to maintain its lead, aiming to stay in this position for a longer time.

On December 29, 2018, the price of Ethereum broke through $150, and its market value also reached $15.3 billion. Since mid-December, Ethereum's market capitalization has doubled from roughly $8 billion to nearly $16 billion today. It has been suggested that this price increase may be due to the upcoming Constantinople Ethereum Hard Fork.

Despite a recent rebound, Ethereum is down 20% from its all-time high in 2018. Many platforms and companies based on the Ethereum blockchain are facing regulatory pressure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, because the digital token products issued by these platforms and companies may be unregistered securities.

The development of Ethereum has its established route, and developers must carry out hard forks on a regular basis to ensure that Ethereum can continuously update the latest technology. Developers have discovered that the difficulty bomb (difficulty bomb) written in Ethereum will slow down the speed of removal at a certain point in time, and it is likely to cause blocks to not be mined, which in turn restricts the development of the entire Ethereum blockchain.

In fact, Ethereum has undergone several forks, one of which was related to a hack that eventually led to Ethereum Classic (ETC). Odaily sorted out the previous 7 forks (for details, please click "History confirms that after the "Constantinople hard fork", the price of ETH will show a downward trend》）。

The upcoming Constantinople hard fork is expected to significantly improve the performance of Ethereum, and some major changes such as mining rewards mentioned in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) will also be implemented in this hard fork.

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according toOdaily reportsimage description

Hand-painted concise version of Ethereum fork history (From MyCrypto）

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according toSelf-media entropy chain observationArranging, Byzantium was originally an immigrant city established by the ancient Greeks. Later, Emperor Constantine of the Roman Empire expanded and moved his capital here, and renamed it Constantinople, making the city a historical city, and successively became Rome, Byzantium. The capital of four empires, Latin and Ottoman. The development process of Ethereum can be regarded as the process of urban development.

At present, Ethereum is in the metropolis stage, and there are two parts in this stage, both of which represent important changes in the underlying protocol of Ethereum, which is the hard fork of Ethereum.

According to the agreement of the 49th development meeting of Ethereum, the "Constantinople" hard fork is tentatively scheduled for January 16, 2019, and will be activated at block 7,080,000. The upgrade includes five improvements:

The upgraded Ethereum network is lighter, faster and more secure. But the following points are worth noting:

1. EIP-1234 is the most controversial project. This project proposes to reduce the block reward after the "Byzantine" hard fork from 3 ETH to 2 ETH. As a result, miners' income will be greatly reduced.

2. Currently, Ethereum’s POW is a proof-of-work mechanism, and it will gradually transition to a POW+POS hybrid mechanism and a pure POS in the future. Miners' income decreases, and transaction fees for traders decrease.

3. Since the POW mechanism is mostly looking for random numbers during the mining process, the energy and resources used to find random numbers will disappear forever. After Ethereum upgrades the POW+POS mechanism, it will reduce the waste of power resources caused by mining.

4. Unlike the hard fork caused by the DAO emergency, "Constantinople" is the result of an upgrade based on the "Byzantine" protocol, which has been unanimously agreed by the developers, so there will be no splits and no new ones. coins appear.

In other words, after the upgrade of Constantinople, the biggest losers will be the existing Ethereum miners. This incident aroused the opinions of some miners, hoping to add the ASIC-resistant algorithm ProgPoW to this upgrade.

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The twists and turns of the Constantinople fork

This hard fork was first decided in mid-October last September. On September 15, the core developers of Ethereum decided to launch the ETH hard fork named "Constantinople" in Ropsten. The fork scheme adopted The most notable is the proposal of Afri Schoedon, developer of the main Ethereum client Parity - EIP1234.

On October 5th, the core developers of Ethereum announced for the first time that they would postpone the release of the Constantinople upgrade version on Ropsten, mainly because there are still some loopholes in this version, and set the new upgrade time to reach the height of the Ropsten block 4,230,000 (arrived in the early morning of October 14th), it will take about 3 weeks of testing time after the upgrade, and the upgrade of the test network is expected to be completed in early November.

However, by the morning of the 13th, the upgrade had failed. It was eventually delayed until this year.

to reportto reportIn mid-October last year, the reason for the failure of Ethereum's hard fork may be that the "consensus" of network nodes failed.

What is a consensus problem?Nulltx.comAfter further analysis, it believes that the main reason for the failure of this upgrade is that there are not enough miners to advance the network:

• Since the token rewards of the test network have no value, and the network does not need many miners to process transactions, there are not enough miners for the test network.

• To upgrade successfully, most of the nodes on the Ropsten test network must be upgraded to the latest software to start Constantinople. Now it turns out that upgraded nodes are not enough. The media also said that this is a worrying sign because it implies that many nodes lack interest in network upgrades.

• The third is the upgrade time. Nulltx.com stated that it can now be seen that this weekend is a bad time for the upgrade of the testnet, when few people were monitoring the upgrade.

create。Hudson Jameson createA dedicated Reddit thread is used to communicate with the community, and the comments in it include:

You have no idea how competitive this field is. This huge and useless hard fork delay has a very negative impact on the credibility of Ethereum. - Produde (@Dudtrade)

"According to this rate, we will not be able to reach Casper (one of the Ethereum expansion plans) until 2030."@ TrueValueCapital

But some expressed understanding and support, even joking that miners might be happy about the delayed release.

“I’d rather they delay and then need 3 last minute emergency patches like last year. Take the time to do the right thing. R&D software is not easy.”@ potatodotexe

"Just keep doing what you need to do to stay safe and thanks for all the great work."@clarkster

Although the upgrade failed, as some developers said, this is why it is tested on the test network before the official upgrade, just to find out the problem, which is not a bad thing after all.

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The Impact of Ethereum Hard Fork on Currency Price and Ecology

For the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, it seems that the first and possibly most important hard fork of 2019 is awaited. There is no doubt that this hard fork will definitely have a huge impact on the price of Ethereum, because Ethereum will be unveiled in a new version and will help its future development. We expect that after this hard fork, the price of Ethereum can go higher, while the prices of other cryptocurrencies may suffer in a short period of time during this period. In the past three weeks, the price of Ethereum has risen by 85%. The hard fork seems to have played a positive role in promoting the price of Ethereum, which is also good news for currency holders.

analysts think, the upcoming Constantinople hard fork will reduce the mining reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, which will reduce the supply of new ETH, resulting in an increase in price. Before the fork time comes, the ETH market will continue to remain positive and will not be easily pulled down.

A similar situation also happened with the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, before the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, its price rose while other cryptocurrencies suffered for a long time. However, the result of the "fork war" caused BCH to fork into BSV and BCH, but the total market value of BSV and BCH after the fork was not as good as that of BCH before the fork.

Odaily was previously based on the historical market performance of Ethereum, it is found that during the hard fork, the market fluctuation will be in three stages:

1. Before the hard fork, the price is usually rising;

2. During the hard fork, as well as before and shortly after, the price peaked;

3. After the hard fork, the price of ETH began to fall and adjusted in different positions.

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What does the user need to do?

Generally speaking, ordinary users don't need to do anything, just put the currency on the exchange that supports the fork, and wait for the fork to be finalized. Exchanges that already support the Ethereum Constantinople fork include (incomplete statistics): Huobi Global Station, Binance Binance, OKEx, Bibox, IDEX (Aurora), Bitforex...

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I am Lu Xiaoming, editor of Odaily. I am exploring the real blockchain. Please add lohiuming for breaking news and communication. Please note your name, unit, position and reason.

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The Ethereum hard fork upgrade test failed, mainly because there were not many miners working on weekends?

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Ethereum's "difficulty bomb" is delayed again, when will it "explode"?