This article comes fromCoindesk, Originally by Christine Kim
Translator | Moni
This article comes from
, Originally by Christine Kim
Translator | Moni
With less than 24 hours to go, ethereum, currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is about to launch its sixth and seventh system-wide upgrades, when users around the world will need to make two near-simultaneous changes to its code.
The two upgrades, dubbed Constantinople and St. Petersburg, are "hard forks," meaning new rules will be added to the ethereum software that are incompatible with past versions. Both upgrades will also fork at the same block height of 7,280,000.
If users decide to upgrade, St. Petersburg will effectively disable parts of the Constantinople upgrade code and host some serious vulnerabilities affecting smart contract security. Additionally, according to independent Ethereum developer Lane Retting, four out of five planned Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) will go unnoticed by ordinary users.
According to Lane Retting, the Constantinople hard fork is mainly "maintenance and optimization upgrades", and the only user group that will make major changes will be Ethereum miners, that is, those who assemble Ethereum transactions into blocks and Professional hardware operators competing for mining rewards.
In fact, once Constantinople and St. Petersburg are activated, the Ethereum block reward will be reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, which is the same as the previous Byzantium hard fork, when the block reward Reduced from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. Lane Retting says:
“Reduction in ETH for block rewards obviously has a huge impact on miners.”
Eric Conner stated in September 2018:
“The supply of ETH in late 2018 and early 2019 exceeded the community’s initial assumptions. The current inflation rate is about 7.5%... We will reduce the reward per block to 2 ETH, which can reduce inflation rate down to 4.5% - until the Casper upgrade is complete.”
Before tomorrow's upgrade, we summarize some of the potentially significant impacts of Ethereum code changes as follows:
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Constantinople and St. Petersburg upgrades will undergo a series of Ethereum improvement proposal updates
EIP 145: Bitwise shifting instructions in EVM of the Ethereum virtual machine, the bitwise shifting instructions in EVM must be able to realize the gas cost consumption of native instructions through arithmetic operations. This Ethereum improvement proposal adds a native function to the Ethereum protocol. It is simpler and cheaper to operate the bitwise move of the Ethereum virtual machine.
EIP 1014: Skinny CREATE2, an Ethereum improvement proposal that allows you to interact with some smart contracts that have not yet been created;
EIP 1052: EXTCODEHASH operation code, the Ethereum smart contract now uses the EXTCODECOPY operation code, for some large contracts, this operation code is expensive, after the deployment of the new operation code EXTCODEHASH, it will make related operations cheaper, Gas consumption is less.
secondary titlefork moniorAccording to the estimate of the blockchain browser website Amberdata, the double-fork upgrade of Constantinople and St. Petersburg is expected to take place at 19:15 UTC on February 28.
Since the rate of block mining varies from hour to hour, Ethereum users, miners, and developers keep a close eye on the progress of block height increases. Once the hard fork is activated, users can access the
"On the website, the developer tool is used to monitor the progress of the two hard forks in real time. This tool visualizes the data of the Ethereum blockchain and sorts it according to the time progress.
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The Ethereum hard fork has actually been delayed many times
Although the Ethereum community hopes that the upgrade can go smoothly every time, there will always be a lot of uncertainty when it comes to hard forks, and this situation has actually occurred in past Ethereum upgrades. Upgrading is not mandatory, which means that some users can continue to use the old code as long as they want.
Since the upgrade test of Yilai began in July 2018, this issue is actually very worthy of attention. In addition, Ethereum developers have also faced many obstacles, resulting in constant delays in the activation of Constantinople. Originally, Constantinople was released on the main network in October 2018, but due to problems discovered after the code was released on the test network, the upgrade was finally postponed to January 2019.
Since then, Ethereum developers have announced in December last year that the Constantinople upgrade will be carried out at block height 7,080,000. However, due to the discovery of security vulnerabilities in the code at the last moment, the fork block height has to be adjusted to 7,280,000 , the situation at that time can be described as very dramatic:
January 13, 2019: 48 hours before the decision to implement a hard fork at block height 7,080,000, Ethereum developers were suddenly notified of an important security vulnerability;
January 18, 2019: The developers agreed to postpone the activation of Constantinople on the mainnet, postponed the upgrade time to February this year, and proposed a new hard fork block height;
February 12, 2019: After the final software releases for Constantinople and St. Petersburg were released by major Ethereum clients such as Geth and Parity, the official Ethereum website published a blog post that fully described the upgrade .
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It should come, it will come
Due to the very long delay of this upgrade, it also caused dissatisfaction in the Ethereum community about the Constantinople (and St. Petersburg) release.
Taylor Monahan, CEO of blockchain wallet tool MyCrypto, admitted:
"I hope that the Constantinople hard fork upgrade can be completed quickly, because this matter has distracted the core developers, the community, and the entire ecosystem for a long time. The issue we need to focus on now is how to make Ethereum moving forward."
