Julia Magas Gauging Community Expectations and Developer Readiness as Ethereum’s Constantinople Launch Date Approaches Difficulty bomb delay, mining reward decrease, ETH price change — What else is to be expected by the community ahead of the Constantinople fork? Difficulty bomb delay, mining reward decrease, ETH price change — What else is to be expected by the community ahead of the Constantinople fork? Perspectives from analysts, investors and developers 4383 Total views 154 Total shares In depth The next attempt to implement the Ethereum (ETH) hard fork is expected to come in the interval from Jan. 14 to Jan. 18 — or according to Afri Schoedon, the release manager for the Parity Ethereum client, Jan. 16. At that point, the 7,080,000 block will be extracted, and the Constantinople upgrade will be activated.
all-core-devs call: constantinople upgrade for ethereum mainnet activation suggested for 16th of january 2019, block number to be confirmed on black friday in a fortnight — Afri ️ Jan 16 (@5chdn) November 9, 2018 To be on the safe side, the Ethereum Foundation also added an emergency switch that will delay the activation of Constantinople in case something goes wrong. Initially, the hard fork was planned for November 2018 but was postponed after Ethereum clients failed to reach a consensus during the launch, as reported by Cointelegraph on Oct.
15. While Ethereum developers are going over the final details, investors, miners and decentralized application ( DApps ) operators are discussing the fork’s pros and cons, and analysts are forecasting Ether’s price change. Once again about Constantinople Originally planned for November, the Constantinople hard fork contains a number of changes and code optimizations designed to turn the current Byzantium into a more progressive Constantinople. Most of the improvements are aimed at reducing the costs of work or simplifying the process of creating DApps. In particular, they include a 12-month delay of the so-called “ difficulty bomb ,” which contributes to timely upgrades, and also suggests a decrease in the mining reward from 3 to 2 ETH for each mined block. Such changes are provided by the roadmap and are necessary for the gradual transition of the network to a proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm and further improvement of scaling . What turns Byzantium into Constantinople is five major Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs), which are needed to soften the transition from the current proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm to the more energy-efficient PoS algorithm.
In particular, the EIP 145 proposal will allow DApp developers to optimize particular operations, which will allow the reduction of gas costs necessary for work.
EIP 1014 will provide an opportunity to interact with addresses that have not yet been initialized on the blockchain, EIP 1052 introduces new operational codes for generating address hashes.
EIP 1283 includes new features that will also reduce gas costs, and EIP 1234 will delay the “difficulty bomb” for 12 months and will reduce mining rewards. What’s next? In the future, the transition to a pure PoS ( the Casper upgrade ) will be made as part of the next phase of improvements to the Serenity code. Once the innovations are implemented, large holders of the third-largest cryptocurrency will join miners in the process of transaction validation. Such a scheme will reduce the likelihood of a 51 percent attack and increase the network’s security , since such validators can lose investments in case of abuse. To make the network more technically stable, the size of the mining block reward will be reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, and the announced launch of the so-called ” difficulty bomb ,” which will gradually complicate the extraction of Ether and make it unprofitable (“ Ice Age ”), will be postponed for a year.
The difficulty bomb is a gradual increase in the complexity of cryptocurrency mining, which makes mining unprofitable for the miners. This is necessary when switching from PoW to PoS. The PoS consensus algorithm, in addition to improved security, will bring cheaper transactions and faster production of new blocks.
Sharding will also become possible, which, together with the additional solutions of second layers like Plasma and Raiden , is supposed to significantly increase Ethereum’s scalability. The concept of sharding can be represented as the work of a client of torrents. The blockchain breaks up nodes and transactions into smaller independent components called shards and each has its own transaction history log that processes only its own transactions, thereby taking a load off of the network. Scalability has been Ethereum’s Achilles’ heel , and after the implementation of these solutions, it will be hypothetically increased by thousands of times, which will make the platform suitable for widespread commercial use.
9. Blockchains of the future with proof of stake and sharding will be thousands of times more efficient, and so the efficiency sacrifices of putting things on a chain will become more and more acceptable. — Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) December 10, 2018 Vitalik Buterin ’s idea to achieve the same throughput capability as the Visa payment system, which handles 24,000 operations per second, is also planned for future upgrades. In its current state, the Ethereum network is able to process a maximum of 25 transactions per second (TPS), while many “Ethereum killers” in this regard have stepped far forward.
For example, EOS is able to manage 1,200 TPS and Tron can already handle 2,000 TPS. Ethereum developers hope that their blockchain will become more competitive, and, in addition to a large number of operations, will offer working smart contracts and tremendous experience in solving technical problems. Hudson Jameson, a developer relations officer at the Ethereum Foundation, expressed his expectations to Cointelegraph with respect to the Constantinople’s main mission: “The Constantinople network upgrade paves the way for cheaper smart contracts for a variety of use cases, especially state channels that can help scale the network.” Novelties from the developers On Jan.
4, during a regular video call, Ethereum Foundation members discussed the introduction of the ProgPoW code, which is aimed at countering ASIC miners. Until the last moment, it hadn’t been clear whether this new algorithm would be introduced in Constantinople. Things changed after the Ethereum developers meeting, during which the team decided to postpone the transition to ProgPoW until Istanbul, the subsequent network upgrade, as reported by Cointelegraph on Jan. 4.
Among other novelties being discussed by developers is the Ethereum 1x update, which implementation is scheduled for 2019. Several working groups shared their achievements, stressing that the decision was still at the earliest stages of development.
The list of innovations does not end there. Recently, new promising developments have appeared. Among them are solutions based on Snark (in which transaction data is converted into constant “compressed evidence”), which will allow reaching a significant level of network bandwidth without using Plasma and Raiden. Furthermore, this technology will increase data privacy. Another possible evolutionary path could be Turbo Geth , which will reduce the amount of stored history of all network computing by 80 percent and increase its throughput. Meanwhile Parity Technologies is already preparing for the transition to Casper.
Developers have added an additional version of Substrate, which was released on GitHub on Oct. 14 as an experiment. The code contains a mechanism of transition to the “ Shasper ” upgrade, which combines the platform’s in-house scaling solution, sharding, with its PoS consensus switch, Casper. New coins expected, but not officially recognized Despite the fact that no new coins are expected during Constantinople, most of the major exchanges have already announced support for possible forks and airdrops.
Poloniex , Bittrex , Huobi , Binance and OKEx warn users of the need to transfer funds to the exchange in advance to get possible coins, and projects supporting the fork are asked to contact for cooperation. Binance Will Support the Upcoming Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork https://t.co/4bbgAHMz7Z — Alex Krüger (@Crypto_Macro) December 24, 2018 According to him, the 90 percent increase ETH experienced during the last month may be connected with the Constantinople hard fork. The ETH price spiked once the date for the upgrade release was announced, but later fell against the United States dollar.
Krüger also suggests that other Ethereum upgrades had a different effect on the price of the coin. Thus, it can be difficult to predict what will happen after Constantinople is released.
According to Krüger , after the fork, Ethereum miners who spend more than $0.075 per unit on electricity will be operating at a loss in case the ETH price remains at about $155. However, there will still be those miners who may continue their activity even if this happens. Arthur Hayes, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX , hopes that ETH will revive when the ICO market comes back to life.
Hayes believes that the ICO market will start to gain momentum once again in the near future and will have a great influence on ETH. He explained : “The use case for Ether is primarily ICOs. That market is dead right now. Once there are new issues, then Ether will rebound aggressively.
When the ICO market returns, Ether will quickly test $200. The timing of the ICO rebirth is 12 to 18 months out.” What if the fork fails? In general, judging by the table tracking Ethereum clients’ readiness to upgrade and coordinated work of developers, problems with consensus will probably be eliminated. All new versions of Ethereum clients have already received updates, which will automatically start working on Jan.
16. And users will automatically receive new ETH for use in the new network. The security manager of the Ethereum Foundation, Martin Swende, noted that the new version of the go-ethereum client will contain a kind of “emergency switch” that will postpone the upgrade if the its release fails. In general, the Ethereum Foundation team is positive and confident about everything regarding the readiness for the upcoming fork. “We are on track to have a successful network upgrade,” Hudson Jameson emphasized. Additionally, the developers have provided a whole road map for the subsequent protocol upgrade, which will allow planning and tracking of all the iterations necessary so that the transition to PoS is completed on time. Last call The crypto space is awaiting the first — and one of the largest — forks of 2019.
While the investors’ eyes are fixed upon ETH rates, and the developers are finalizing all the iterations to be prepared for a smooth upgrade, the share of nodes ready for the switch remains small.
Though Afri Schoedon assumes an overall upgrade rate is about 44 percent, according to the current statistics provided by Ethernodes, only 15.8 percent of all Ethereum clients have upgraded to the latest version, despite there being only one week left. Despite the fact that the developers haven’t announced any possible forks, the appearance of new coins and airdrops cannot be excluded. As demonstrated by 2018’s Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork , things may change at the last second..