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On January 15, Ethereum's developers put out a security alert that they were postponing the scheduled Constantinople upgrade. Not everyone made the appropriate changes, however, and there is currently a parallel universe of Ethereum mining. A "chain split" has occurred, and some are mining the unofficial Constantinople chain without consensus from the majority of the network.
Update to Stop The Upgrade
The delay came after potential vulnerabilities were discovered in one of the new upgrades. As the statement delaying the fork says:
We are investigating any potential vulnerabilities and will follow up on this blog post and across social media channels.
Key to the Ethereum community have been the best course of action to be done to delay the planned Constantinople fork that would have occurred at block 7,080,000 on January 16, 2019.
People need to install a new version to avoid violating consensus.
It seems not all of the miners got the message. At least 10TH / s worth of power was still mining the unofficial chain at the time of writing, owned by Ethdevops.io:
At the time of writing, there was actually more hashred on the forked version of Ethereum than on Ethereum Classic:
'Non-Zero Risk'
The vulnerability in question allows for a particular form of scamming which takes some degree of sophistication to understand. The bottom line is a change in the way. A "reentrancy attack" is specific to smart contracts. It is not the same as a replay attack or a double-spend. It's a unique problem. ChainSecurity, who uncovered the flawed code, explains it this way:
Certain preconditions have to be met to make a contract vulnerable:
1. There must be function A, in which a transfer is sent by a state-changing operation. This can sometimes be non-obvious, e.g. a second transfer or an interaction with another smart contract.
2. There is a function that is compatible with the attacker (a) changes state and (b) whose state changes conflict with those of function A.
3. Function B needs to be executable with less than 1600 gas (2300 gases – 700 gas for the CALL).
Although the vulnerability is not present on the actual blockchain, it is better safe than sorry, says Ethereum's official blog:
Security researchers like ChainSecurity and TrailOfBits (and are still running) analysis across the entire blockchain. They did not find any cases of this vulnerability in the wild. However, there is still a non-zero risk that some contracts could be affected.
Understandably, with a large decentralized network, it's impossible to get a network upgrade through a timely manner. Looking at a Bitcoin node will show you that many different versions are active on the network at a given time. A minority of mining nodes are currently mining the Constantinople fork as if it had happened, regrettably not earning any actual valid Ethereum in the process.
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