Ethereum developers have announced details about an upcoming technical fork that aims to resolve the ongoing issues in its network.
Jeffrey Wilcke, founder of Ethlabs and one of Ethereum’s Geth developers, wrote on Reddit, “After many hours of coding, testing, more coding, reviews and discussions, we can finally announce the next hardfork's block number:
Main net: 2.675.000 Test net: 1.885.000”
CoinDesk explains that the new rules will be activated at block number 2,675,000, which is expected to take place sometime around next Tuesday. Called “Spurious Dragon”, the hard fork is aimed at erasing empty accounts that the attackers used to bloat the Ethereum blockchain.
On 22 September 2016, Ethereum announced that it was under a computational distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), which caused slowing down of the network. Last month, the network underwent fourth hard fork for EIP150 gas cost changes.
According to CryptoCoinsNews, the latest hard fork is more of a continuation of the fourth, which incorporated certain changes that needed to be urgently implemented. The final optimizations were saved for later and are being implemented with the impending fifth fork.
The network’s first hard fork was to upgrade to proof of stake, while the second was “Homestead” – the first stable release. The third hard fork was to undo the DAO theft and return nearly $170 million worth of ETH. This fork, in particular, was highly debated as the “immutable” feature was compromised as a result of the fork.
“[T]he fact that immutability has been destroyed is definitely troubling. To some extent it erodes confidence because immutability is one of the main pillars of blockchain”, Steven Nerayoff, Esq. LL.M., Lisk Advisor, Ethereum Senior Advisor, CEO of Cloudparc, told EconoTimes. “I think the danger about this is that it sets a precedent about Ethereum on a slightly stronger position because its ecosystem has breadth to it, even more than Bitcoin’s. I am unsure on whether a smaller ecosystem would be able to weather the storm, but it will definitely grow over time.”
