Posts Tagged ‘Ethereum hard fork

Just a reminder that on December 7th, at block number 9069000, Ethereum (ETH) will execute the first phase of its Istanbul hard fork (a little more than 19000 blocks as of writing this). Earlier the hard fork was scheduled to happen today on 4th of December at block 9056000, but the date has been pushed back a bit. The second phase of the hard fork is scheduled for early 2020, though no exact date has been announced yet. The first phase of the Istanbul hard fork is not going to be changing anything related to the PoW mining algorithm hat the project uses at the moment, after the fork Ethereum will still be mined using the Ethash algorithm. The second phase for early next year though will bring a change in the mining algorithm from Ethash to the ProgPow algorithm, rendering the current Ethash ASIC miners useless for Ethereum mining (there are other Ethash cryptos out there though). To see the list of EIPs included in the fork (Ethereum Improvement Proposals). Make sure you upgrade your Ethereum local node if you are running one before the fork occurs in order to avoid possible problems.

To check the time left before Ethereum (ETH) hard forks next at block 9069000…

ethereum-classic-logo

Ehereum (ETH) has successfully hard forked a few days ago and moved on a new chain, however this also brought to life Ethereum Classic (ETC) that continue to run on the old blockchain without any modifications that were made by the forking Ehereum (ETH). Initially the support for Ethereum Classic was a bit questionable, but after Poloniex – the current largest Ethereum (ETH) exchange added a market for trading ETC as well things started turning. There are already a few exchanges trading ETC with more probably soon to follow, multiple services such as block explorers and quite a few mining pools already available. The current value of 1 ETC is about 1/20th that of 1 ETH, but the daily volume traded on Poloniex shows that the Ethereum Classic has almost half the volume of Ethereum.

The most important question that people probably have at the moment is how they can get a hold of their ETC coins based on the ETH they are holding. There are some good and some bad news here, if you were running a local wallet then the ETH coins you had in it prior the hard fork will also give you the ability to have the same amount of ETC coins. What you will have to do is to run a copy of the blockchain prior the hard fork at block 1920000 and run a pre-hardfork client such as geth earlier than version 1.4.10. Of course for the ETH coins you would still need to run the original blockchain with a client supporting the hardfork (make sure you use different directories for storing the two chains). If you had all of your ETH coins in an exchange or an online wallet, then you might be out of luck unless that wallet or exchange provides support for ETC as well. In the case of Poloniex any ETH that you help in the exchange resulted in you getting the same amount of ETC, however still only a few exchanges do provide support for ETC.

At this point it is quite hard to say what is the actual amount of ETC coins that can be operated by their owners and unfortunately there is the chance that some exchanges that do not officially add support for ETC can still get a hold of the ETC coins that were available as ETH balances prior to the hard fork. So at the moment it is still hard to predict what exactly will happen with Ethereum Classic, all we can say is that we are seeing peak in user interest and support, but will that be enough to establish ETC as a long term alternative to ETH or not is still hard to say. So you might want to keep an eye out for ETC and if you can get a hold of your Ethereum Classic coins you should do so just in case. As for those of you that may decide to mine ETC (it is on a separate chain after the hard fork) you should know that there is still a quite a bit of risk involved and ETC future is still a bit uncertain. We are going to be keeping a track of how things with Ethereum Classic progress further on and keep you updated on how the situation evolves.

For more information about the Ethereum Classic (ETC) alternative visit the official website…

geth-hard-fork-support

The latest Ethereum Go client Geth version 1.4.10 named “Return of the ETH” has been just made available for download as the go-ethereum team’s DAO hard-fork implementation. It enables anyone to choose whether they would like to support the DAO hard-fork or oppose it, and take them to their blockchain of choice. On startup (on the main network) Geth will print the currently configured choice, which you can freely change with the appropriate flag at any time. If no flag is specified, the previous configuration is used. If no fork choice was ever provided, Geth will default to supporting the fork per the majority vote.

How to make your choice:
– To support the DAO hard-fork, start Geth with --support-dao-fork
– To oppose the DAO hard-fork, start Geth with --oppose-dao-fork

To download the latest Ethereum Geth client 1.4.10 with the Hard Fork support…


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