![Monero [xmr] gears up for hard fork scheduled for today](https://ohiobitcoin.com/storage/2019/03/Screen-Shot-2019-03-09-at-4.51.25-PM.png "Monero [xmr] gears up for hard fork scheduled for today")
Monero [XMR], the thirteenth largest cryptocurrency in the market, is a few hours from its first hard fork this year. The upgrade is scheduled to occur on block #1788000 later today. At press time, Monero’s block height was 178,7800.
According to the main thread, the hard fork is going to introduce four key changes. The upgrade is going to bring some changes to the dynamic block size algorithm in order to fix big bang attack, a spam-bloating attack, and ensure scaling in for the short-run and long-run.
Big bang attack | Source:
Short-term scalability and long-term scalability
The second update concerns Monero network’s mining algorithm, which is said to bring down ASIC mining. The team stated,
“Second, a third PoW tweak (CryptoNight-R) to curb the ASICs currently present on the network and further preserve ASIC resistance. As a result, miners will have to update their miners (i.e. mining software) as well.”
The network’s constant mining algorithm updates resulted in several ASIC mining pools incurring losses. Coinhive, a cryptocurrency mining platform, cited this upcoming hard fork as one of the reasons they on March 8. The drop in XMR’s price during the crypto-winter was another reason that contributed to the mining platform shutting down.
The third update introduced via this hard fork will be “a dummy encrypted payment ID,” which will be added to each transaction. This update aims at improving transaction homogeneity. The fourth update would simplify amount commits by “shrinking the size of amount encodings and using deterministic masks.”
The Reddit post read,
“Note that there technically will be two hard forks (i.e. one on approximately the 9th of March and one on the approximately the 10th of March). This provides a grace period on the network where transactions in the transaction pool that still use the v1 transaction format are allowed to be included in a block by miners.”
Monero team has asked users, services, pool operators, merchants, and exchanges to upgrade to the newer versions, or , which were released earlier this week. These new versions make sure that all the clients are ready for both the hard forks.
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Published at Sun, 10 Mar 2019 13:30:16 +0000