Will hard fork be a revelation or a new stumbling block?
February 28, Ethereum hard fork passed with great baggage of fear. What did miners face after this landmark event?
Answer is… Nothing special
Data is constantly updated on the EtherNodes portal, and, according to the latest report, more than 25% of the total number of users have joined. More than 35% of Parity users also installed Constantinople-friendly system software. The system is more than 30% ready.
Miners have been expressed an opinion about hard fork from the moment it announced: some miners were satisfied since the ASIC-update was not removed from the network, however, the decrease in the reward had a negative impact on them.
Other miners (GPUs) are extremely skeptical of this update:
- a decrease in the reward reduces the profits from the mining of Ethereum.
- the presence of ASIC in the network loads the network and makes the extraction of ETH even harder.
GPU miners are worried about this point, since the fact that the network is not freed from the ASIC may lead to the emergence of new more powerful ASIC-miners for the Ethash algorithm (they have already appeared), which may generally force out the GPU-miners from the extraction of Ether.
So what happened?
Trustnodes portal reports that the update was completed without any excesses and problems that the most impressionable users could expect.
Immediately with Constantinople, the hard fork Petersburg was launched, which fixed the bug with the EIP-1283 protocol, which created problems with vulnerabilities such as Reentrancy and forced developers to postpone the hard fork date from January to the end of February.
Full-time emission will now be at the level of 13,400 ETH, the extraction time per unit will be 14 seconds, and the reward for it will be reduced from 3 to 2 ETH (EIP 1234). Ethereum inflation rate will be about 4%.
Main changes in the Ethereum network:
— EIP 145 — improving the efficiency and speed of the blockchain by adding Bitwise switching mechanisms to the Ethereum virtual machine;
— EIP 1052 — Improving network usability for developing smart contracts and simplifying certain operations in Ethereum code.
Now the information in the Ethereum blockchain will be processed faster and more efficiently, and gas consumption will be reduced by 10 times. Verification of smart contracts will be a simpler task.
What to expect?
At this stage, it is not known what the hard fork will lead to, but no hard fall of the market has been noticed, despite the fact that Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency. In any case, there is no need to wait for the repetition of the history with Bitcoin Cash. As far as fears of GPU miners are justified, time will tell.