Where in the World is Constantinople? – VTRADEtech – Medium

Where in the World is Constantinople? – VTRADEtech – Medium

Ethereum (ETH), the second largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, has been teasing its latest hard fork, Constantinople since late 2018. Since the first time the fork was delayed towards the end of last year, people have been anxiously awaiting the upgrade’s arrival. After postponing the release the first time, Constantinople was rescheduled for January 2019 until a bug was discovered that could make smart contracts vulnerable to Reentrancy attacks. In order to fix the problem, the fork was delayed again. At the time, there was no expected date provided.

Ethereum has seen resistance to hard forks in the past. In July 2016 developers pushed a hard fork that so divided the Ethereum community, it split the cryptocurrency into two distinct groups running totally separate instances of the blockchain. These two factions became today’s ETH network and the smaller Ethereum Classic (ETC). The split came down to ideological differences. Those that rejected the hard fork, creating ETC advocated for blockchain immutability. The group in favor of the fork, modern day ETH, argued for extra-protocol intentionality, decentralized decision-making, and conflict resolution. The majority of nodes did fork and the ETH network is much larger than ETC. ETC’s size along with its PoW protocol are likely what made it vulnerable to the 51% attack in January 2019 which resulted in estimated losses of $1.1 million, only a fraction of which was recovered.

Constantinople isn’t expected to create the same kind of controversy as the hard fork that created the two Ethereum networks did back in the summer of 2016. First, people have had since the fork was first announced in August of 2018 to voice concerns about it. But second, and more importantly, the fork is said to be mostly maintenance-based, resulting in few if any noticeable differences for the end user. Unlike previous upgrades, this one doesn’t fundamentally affect how data is processed in the distributed ledger.

Now, however, it seems Constantinople really is on the horizon. It’s scheduled to take place on 28 February, 2019. Let’s hope the bug bounty teams give it a clean bill of health this time around. January’s release was halted the day before it was scheduled to go live, so there is still time for this can to be kicked further down the road.

Published at Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:04:31 +0000