
Byzantium Hard Fork Announcement - joshschreuder
https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/10/12/byzantium-hf-announcement/
======
runeks
> Delay of the ice age / difficulty bomb by 1 year, and reduction of block
> reward from 5 to 3 ether

I wonder if the planned switch to proof-of-stake is ever going to happen.

In any case, what's the point of continuously postponing a pre-programmed
difficulty bomb (via a hard for), when miners can just remove this part from
the code and continue with that fork if they wish? Because of this, it seems
like it doesn't do much difference compared to just switching to PoS via a
hard fork whenever it's ready. I mean, if miners really want to continue with
PoW, removing those couple of lines, that define the difficulty time bomb,
from the Ethereum code surely won't be a problem, right?

~~~
DennisP
They just released the fourth proof of concept for proof of stake, they've
simplified the design so it's not much more complicated to implement than
proof of work, and they've got some formal proofs of its properties. They're
also working on a PoC for the initial sharding design. Here's the latest dev
roundup:

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/10/09/roundup-6/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/10/09/roundup-6/)

~~~
runeks
In the blog post[1], on which Casper PoC4[2] is based, Vitalik writes:

> Accountable safety is what brings us this idea of “economic finality”: if
> two conflicting hashes get finalized (ie. a fork), then we have mathematical
> proof that a large set of validators must have violated some slashing
> condition, and we can submit evidence of this to the blockchain and penalize
> them.

Why would the validators, who decide what goes into blocks, willingly include
a proof that they have cheated?

As far as I can see, these proofs must be communicated out-of-band (not
through the blockchain) by nodes, since no validator would ever incriminate
itself by including a proof that it has cheated.

How do nodes coordinate this, and come to agreement on which chain is the
right one?

[1] [https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/minimal-slashing-
conditio...](https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/minimal-slashing-
conditions-20f0b500fc6c)

[2]
[https://github.com/ethereum/pyethereum/pull/809](https://github.com/ethereum/pyethereum/pull/809)

~~~
DennisP
I'm not sure but I think that (a) it does you no good to put your cheats only
on your own node, they need to be public to give you a chance of profiting,
and (b) therefore other staking nodes will see them, and can include them in
the blocks they produce. They could even get rewarded for that.

------
meirelles
IMHO such planned improvements shouldn't be called hard forks, it's a kind
misleading for folks outside cryptocurrencies.

~~~
barkingcat
But it is a hard fork, termed that way by the organization that is the
custodian of the ethereum network. It is only misleading if people outside
cryptocurrencies misrepresent what a hard fork means.

~~~
socrates1024
Ethereum foundation is not the custodian of the network. This is a debatable
point, since it's not perfectly clear what that would mean. Ethereum
Foundation doesn't own the miners or the validating nodes on the network, and
can't control who joins or what software they run. Like other development
teams, they can propose and try to drum up support for upgrades, which they've
been successful at so far.

Detractors of Ethereum would prefer to view the Foundation as having much
greater influence over the network, since that would mean it's less
centralized. Proponents of Ethereum on the other hand would say Ethereum
Foundation's role is similar to that of Bitcoin Core, except the divisiveness
hasn't set in yet (or in the case of Ethereum Classic, opposing factions split
off before it got bad).

~~~
mccoyspace
The Ethereum Foundation owns and controls the trademarks of Ethereum. While
they cannot dictate the code the various participants on the network run, they
get to explicitly decide which version of the code gets to be called
"Ethereum". That's how they maintain control.

~~~
notsofastbuddy
There's a good chance that the trademark is no longer enforceable due to their
failure to apply enforce it against Ethereum Classic. There has been quite a
bit of discussion about this within the community.

~~~
rocqua
Who should they have sued to enforce their trademark in the case of Ethereum
Classic? Unless the argument is for genericization as opposed to failure to
enforce, I don't understand.

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Gaelan
What’s this about an “ice age”?

~~~
onestone
The Ethereum "ice age" is a mechanism to ensure smooth transition to future
planned hard forks. By tweaking the difficulty adjustment formula to
artificially increase block times after some time (the so called "difficulty
bomb") it makes mining on the old chain unprofitable, and incentivizes
everyone to move to the/a new one. The general idea is to prevent extreme
conservatism and stagnation w.r.t. hard forks, as we are seeing in Bitcoin.

~~~
sleavey
So is this giving the developers the control instead of - as with Bitcoin -
the large mining pools? Is that any better?

~~~
jstanley
Incidentally, in Bitcoin, large mining pools do _not_ have control over the
consensus rules. It doesn't matter what the miners say, their chain is
worthless if people refuse to run it.

In Bitcoin, the economic majority decides what is Bitcoin. And when there's a
substantial disagreement (e.g. BCC) there's a fork.

Large mining pools have no more power to enforce consensus rule changes on
others than anybody else does.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Miners can attack rival chains with the same PoW -- so they do have some extra
power over "similar" chains.

~~~
tfha
Attacks that cost them money to the tune of millions of dollars. Sure they can
do it but it's not free.

------
andrethegiant
Do you need to do anything if you own ETH?

~~~
g09980
No. Node owners will upgrade, including exchanges.

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ShabbosGoy
Can anyone explain what "proof of stake" actually is? My understanding is that
it's a virtualized/simulated proof of work system.

~~~
Lon7
In proof of stake a single node decides what the next block added to chain is.
This node gets the block reward and any transaction fees. They don't have to
do any calculations, they simply get to decide, according to a set of rules,
which transactions are in the next block. (Ethereum complicates this a bit by
having multiple nodes "bet" which blocks will be accepted, instead of just one
node choosing the block)

In order to decide who gets to be this node, people Stake coins. The
probability that you are the chosen node is proportional to the number of
coins you have staked. If you are chosen, and you do something against the
rules, like double spend coins and try and add this to the next block, then
you lose your staked coins.

So instead of rewards being proportional to hashing power, they are
proportional to staked coins.

This is still being tested, but it's going pretty well.

~~~
rlpb
> This is still being tested, but it's going pretty well.

AIUI, there isn't consensus today that proof of stake is actually workable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake#Criticism)

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ecesena
Will this lead to a new coin, or is everybody in agreement this time?

Also, what's the plan for ETC, will that also hard fork?

~~~
ecesena
Edit: I’m getting downvoted and don’t understand why. I’m genuinely trying to
get more info, not complaining/joking or anything else.

~~~
Kelab
It's normal with ethereum shillers

Broken model users wont want to pay for gas to use the platform

~~~
15155
So who should pay for the platform, exactly?

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adewinter
> After the fork, eth.getTransactionReceipt(…) will return a status field. The
> status field has a value of 0 when a transaction has failed and 1 when the
> transaction has succeeded.

I wonder why they chose to do it the wrong way around...

~~~
tyleraldrich
It's a status field, not an error code. 0 = False, 1 = True seems like the
right way to do things.

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
But why not return a proper Boolean value then?

~~~
vvillena
Thats how booleans are encoded in the Ethereum ABI. 0x0 is false, 0x1 is true.

------
teekert
Hard Forks are the new ICOs. Well, after reading a bit better, this is
different, it's unlike BCC and BCG but a change in protocol of the main
branch.

~~~
redbeard0x0a
Yes, technically it is a Hard Fork (since that is how the code works). But in
practice, it is just a network and feature update to Ethereum.

------
Kelab
Hopefully we wont see ethereum gold

Steem blockchain hardfork 19 times monero hardfork every 6 months both are
decentralize no vitalik no problem

------
tfha
A hard fork with no replay protection, which means that legacy systems which
do not upgrade will be vulnerable to sending too much money to third parties.
The ethereum devs have chosen to introduce a vulnerability that forces people
to upgrade their systems.

4 days! This announcement was made 4 days before the fork is introduced???
Everyone in the whole ecosystem has 4 days to upgrade it be exposed to a
vulnerability. If you are running special code or your own client, you have to
adjust it for a new block reward, a new script primitive, a difficulty
algorithm, and stuff they are literally calling mathemagic.

I don't see how this is responsible development.

~~~
cko
I believe the hard fork was a known thing in the community for a while now.

I had wanted to jump on the ETH hype train and almost bought a bunch but these
planned forks make the platform seem very “centralized.”

~~~
DennisP
In some ways it's less centralized than Bitcoin, since there are multiple
independent clients, written in different languages. The teams are just good
at cooperating.

As with other blockchains, forks don't happen unless users go along with them.

