ETHGBP Ethereum

Bitcoin Global News (BGN)

January 18, 2019 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- In some of our past articles this week, we have kept you informed on the progress of the now somewhat infamous Constantinople fork of the Ethereum network. More precisely, in our last piece on the subject, we reported that the launch of Constantinople had been halted, essentially indefinitely.

As of today however, the fork has been rescheduled for February 27th, due to the work of a key group of the network’s developers. Simultaneously, the corresponding block number at which this will occur has not yet been determined. Judging by CoinDesk’s report today on the subject, the decision was made on a conference call early this morning, which involved well-known Ethereum figures like Vitalik Buterin and Hudson Jameson.

Central to their decision to move the fork forward was the idea that Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1283, which was found to have a bug that could allow hackers to withdraw unlimited funds from the network’s smart contracts, was left out of the process. Reportedly, EIP 1283 will be improved and scheduled for a future fork in the network.

According to CoinDesk’s sources on the subject, the chief reason for the Ethereum development community’s quick reactivation of the fork was the continued presence of the network’s difficulty bomb. If you are not familiar with what a difficulty bomb is, just think about a piece of code that is supposed to make mining progressively more difficult on the network until it transitions to a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm.  

As we have mentioned before, if you are interested in following the fork’s progress as it unfolds, check out certain websites like this GitHub page dedicated to the event. Finally, keep in mind that at this time, there is no indication that the fork will impact the price of Ether in a detrimental fashion, except in the case of speculators who always enter and leave an asset due to such events.

By: BGN Editorial Staff