Posts Tagged ‘Hard Fork’

Next BEAM Hard Fork is Planned for June 28th (Block #777777)

22, Apr 2020

The Beam project has announced their plans for an upcoming hard fork that will occur at Block Height 777777, expected to be reached on June 28th this year. The most notable change in this hard fork is the switch from BeamHash II to the new BeamHash III algorithm for mining. Do note that since this is a hard fork after the Block Height 777777 is reached, wallets earlier than 5.0 will stop working, so the users will need to upgrade the wallets to version 5.0 or later to access their funds. The Node and the Desktop Wallet binaries should be released around the end of May, so about month before the hard fork.

The wider memory operations in the design of BeamHash III apparently allow better use of the fuller capabilities of a GPU card. Making it easier to saturate the given bandwidth of the GPU card, reducing the potential advantage of other devices, especially FPGAs. The stronger algorithm binding of the new scheme utilized in BeamHash III will make “unknown optimizations” potentially used for secret mining, more unlikely. The lesser compute dependency of BeamHash III reduces the potential advantage of multi-chip ASICs over GPUs whilst also allowing GPUs to run lesser clock rates, for more improved hashrate. And a single chip ASIC would likely not be economically feasible.

– To read the full details of the official announcement of the next BEAM Hard Fork…

Ethereum’s Byzantium Hard Fork is Happening Tomorrow

15, Oct 2017

The Ethereum (ETH) network will be undergoing a planned hard fork at block number 4.37 Million (4,370,000), which will likely occur between 12:00 UTC and 13:00 UTC on Monday, October 16, 2017. Ethereum users should update to the latest version of the Ethereum wallet/Mist if they are using it as well as any of the Ethereum clients – Geth, Parity or Harmony prior to the hard fork in order to be ready. Ethereum websites and mobile applications that allow you to store ether and/or make transactions are running their own Ethereum client infrastructure to facilitate their services and they should be doing the update as well in order to support he hard fork as well.

A hard fork is a change to the underlying Ethereum protocol, creating new rules to improve the system. The protocol changes are activated at a specific block number. All Ethereum clients need to upgrade, otherwise they will be stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules. Metropolis is a planned Ethereum development phase that includes two hard forks: Byzantium and Constantinople. Byzantium is occurring at block number 4.37M (the hard fork happening tomorrow), while the second part – Constantinople does not currently have a release date, but is expected to happen some time in 2018.

Update: The hardfork has been successful, the new block reward is 3 ETH (down from 5), but also the effective block time and difficulty have pretty much halved, so in the end miners should still be able to get a better profit at the moment compared to before the fork.

– Here is a countdown for the time remaining until the Byzantium Hard Fork of Ethereum…


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