By: Blockchain Developer Jesse Abramowitz If you haven’t heard, this week has been intense for any Core developer. With the entire community buzzing about Ethereum’s latest fork Constantinople, it has unfortunately been postponed for very, very valid reasons. Ethereum blockchain I’d like to commend the amazing work to all of the developers for recognizing the situation and losing a lot of sleep to fix it. To date, I haven’t been able to find any updates following the so I figured that it would be good idea to provide an outline of what has happened thus far. I know that a lot of people are curious about this so I figured this article would help make their lives easier too. Ethereum developers call Let’s dive right in! The Fork Ethereum is constantly updating, as most blockchains do. This is accomplished through a fork — where the blockchain is copied at a certain point to a new chain with the protocol updates and the old chain “dies”. Or if it is contentious lives and becomes two currencies to battle it out. More information about forks can be found and about past forks . here here Constantinople Istanbul, or was formerly known as . It was one of the largest ancient cities of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. According to the , for over 2,500 years, it was the major bridge between Europe and Asia and stood between conflicting surges of religion, culture and imperial power. Constantinople was and is still considered one of the most coveted cities in the world… Turkish Istanbul Constantinople Encyclopedia Britannica Although the real Constantinople has no relation to the Ethereum fork, it’s still interesting to understand its etymology and its importance on the Ethereum Network. This does a great job explaining everything you need to know about the Constantinople fork. article What Happened So Far There is a lot of money on the line when dealing with blockchains so all forks are tested out rigorously. First, they test it on a which caused some delays to the original fork. Ropsten testnet Then they forked it on Rinkby testnet on . January 9th After the fork, showing that changes in the gas price of certain operations leave contracts vulnerable to re-entrancy attacks. ChainSecurity determined that the code is vulnerable in an unexpected way because it simulates a secure treasury sharing service where Two parties can jointly receive funds, decide on how to split them, and receive a payout if they agree*. ChainSecurity released this article An attacker will create such a pair with where the first address is the attacker contract listed below and the second address is any attacker account. For this pair the attacker will deposit some money. Not good. Fixes There are some really good fixes have been discussed on this thread and talked about at length during the call on January 18th. here Ethereum Core Developers Difficulty Bomb Before going any further, we need to understand what the difficulty bomb is and why it was so important that a fork happens immediately. In decentralized systems, changes can be hard and may take a while. To avoid impending delays the Difficulty Bomb was introduced. At a certain point, the Bomb will increase the hash difficulty of the Ethereum chain mining blocks slower. This is why it needs to be delayed by a fork every so often facilitating the need for forks. On the Ethereum Developer Call, , an Ethereum core developer, said he ran some scripts and the difficulty bomb is set to reduce block times to 30 seconds by late April and is currently slowing block times (very slightly). Lane Retting This means that the fork has to happen soon. Date of new Fork The final decision was to remove the EIP 1283 from the fork and push the fork back 6 weeks. The block number of the new fork is . 7.28 million on Feburary 27th Fork implementation This is where it gets interesting. We know both Ropsten and Rinkby have been updated. The new fork will be removing the flawed EIP 1283. This means that both Ropsten and Rinkby would either have the security risk going forward and be a less true representation of the Ethereum Network OR they would have to rollback the blocks since the fork and re-implement the new fork. This, of course, would give a lot of developers a lot of stress. If not handled correctly, this would destroy two test networks. On the call, proposed that there should be two forks on the Ethereum network both happening First, the original Constantinople, and next, a second, fixed version where they remove the EIP. This will have no difference on the Mainnet but it will save Rinkby and Ropsten. Peter Szilagyi at the same time: The Problem The Solution This way, they can just run the second fork, and thus be an accurate simulation of Ethereum again (The Devs decided to temporarily call this second fork Constanti_Nope_). There are no block rollbacks needed. As well, it will make testing easier as they can implement the second fork almost immediately on the two test chains. Conclusion Forks are hard but they need to happen. Ethereum is very lucky that has so many amazing developers dedicating their lives to it that they were able to catch a bug fix it and move on with the originally planned fork. What do you think about the Constantinople Fork? Let us know in the comments below! Update: The second Fork is now being called . Petersburg Jesse Abramowitz is a Blockchain Developer at BlockX Labs. He has worked on multiple DApps, projects, and Blockchain Networks. Currently, he is also a lab assistant at a local college and is always looking to help, teach and build on the blockchain. You can reach him at: jesse@blockxlabs.com
