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The developers of Ethereum have agreed on January 16 as a new provisional date for the next planned hardfork of the ethereum network.
The agreement was signed on Friday during the bi-weekly call of the developers of ethereum, in which issues related to the blockchain are dealt with. The main developer of Ethereum explained that the date that was reached by a non-binding verbal agreement was only an estimate and could still be moved in case of unforeseen problems.
He explained:
"We can only say in mid-January, it makes no difference whether we decide on an appointment or not, we can always postpone …"
Delays with the update of Ethereum
The last launch date was reached after the original November release date became impossible due to problems encountered during the test network update.
As reported by Smartereum, the Constantinople code (the imminent update) has been postponed to be implemented on the test network from October 9 to October 15 in others to allow customers to implement, test and release an update that contains a bug discovered. Despite the initial delay, the testnet launch encountered problems that led developers to move the release date until 2019. Constantinople should have been launched on the mainnet on November 4, 2018, just after the Devcon conference.
The developer Lane Rettig, in his contribution during the call, explained some aspects of the Ethereum difficulty bomb, an algorithm included in the main ethereum code that makes blocks increasingly difficult to use. Rettig explained that the difficulty bomb, conceived as an incentive to encourage regular updates of the network, will become visible from January. It would increase the blocking time to 30 seconds by April or May of next year. "So we have time, there are no critical concerns," he said.
Initially, he advised the team to take the time to find out what really did not work in the testnet launch. According to him, a lot of forensic analysis has yet to be done, as developers should also understand how these problems can be avoided in the future, including all related problems.
What to expect from Constantinople
Once launched, Constantinople will reduce mining premiums at 2 ETH per block from the current 3 ETHs per block, as well as improvements that will benefit developers of intelligent contracts and will facilitate better scalability solutions such as status channels and out-of-pocket transactions. chain.
ProgPow or not
Given the delay, it is asked whether a proposal to change the code to remove the ASICs from the network will be included before the launch. Integrated circuits specific to ASIC applications – are specialized mining plants that extract optimally and profitably. The argument against ASICs is that they could undermine the level of decentralization on the network since ASIC miners can overshadow normal GPU miners and influence the network.
The proposal called "ProgPow" is intended to limit the extraction of etereum to these hardware for general purposes and therefore to produce ASICs produced by Bitmain. Before now, the team decided that all improvements to the update of Constantinople had already been completed. And while the inclusion of ProgPoW has not been specifically discussed, the developers have suggested that the formal specifications of the code are incomplete.
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