Ethereum Client & # 39; Geth & # 39; already updated for Constantinople Hard Fork in January

Geth, which is the independent client version (with a command line interface) of Go Ethereum (one of the three original implementations of the Ethereum protocol), has already been updated (v1.18.20) in order to support the changes needed for Constantinople update (hard fork) planned by the Ethereum core developers for January 2019.

In October, Ari Paul, Chief Investment Officer at BlockTower Capital, a cryptoasset investment company, explained through a series of tweets the important distinction of cryptocurrency networks between the "cryptographic protocol", the "consensus rules" "and" customer implementation ":

3 / For all cryptocurrency networks, one has the cryptographic protocol – the way everyone has to interact with the network at the most basic level including sending and checking transactions. This is often only vaguely documented and these cryptographic calculations

– Ari Paul (@AriDavidPaul) October 18, 2018

4 / can be done in many different programming languages. So you have the consent rules (like Bitcoin's consent to nakamoto to have all the nodes that adopt the longest chain with valid rules like the valid chain). Again, the specifications here are often only vaguely documented.

– Ari Paul (@AriDavidPaul) October 18, 2018

5 / Then you have the implementation of the client – the users of the software and the miners / validators use to implement the rules of cryptography and consent. In Bitcoin there are many customers competing with significant use, but Core has a strong majority and is treated as "canon".

– Ari Paul (@AriDavidPaul) October 18, 2018

He then pointed out that for Ethereum, the situation is "somewhat similar, but there is no clear canonical implementation", although Geth is currently the most popular customer. The other two main clients of Ethereum are "Parity Ethereum" and Aleth.

The Ethereum upgrade to Constantinople, one of the effects of which will be the reduction of the block premium from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, was originally scheduled for November. However, since the October update on the Ropsten testnet did not go very well, the main developers decided to postpone the changes to the Constantinople code on the mainnet from January 2019.

Last Friday, December 7, during a meeting of the main developers, it was agreed that the activation point for Constantinople would be to block 7.080.000 on the Ethereum blockchain, with the live update once this blockade was taken. According to Afri Schoedon, responsible for the release of Partity Ethereum, this update should take place between January 14th and 18th.

Geth developers call their latest version on GitHub, v1.18.20, which took place on Tuesday (December 11th), "a bit of a special version".

"On one side is the version that finally enables the Constantinople hard fork on mainnet to block 7080000 (and Rinkeby to block 3660663) .It is also the latest planned version of the 1.8 family (we will continue to do hotfixes if necessary), which means we will start merging incompatible changes with previous versions on the master in preparation for Geth 1.9.0 (we do not have an ETA for this, but January first). "

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