9,069,000 is the Magic Number!

9,069,000 is the Magic Number!

Something special happened yesterday (Sunday), and it may be a part of the next generation of the Internet. It happened with the Istanbul hard fork of Ethereum [here]:

It is the 8th fork in a series of updates, and builds towards Ethereum 2.0. These updates are defined as Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIP) and named: 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028 and 2200). This new version will move Ethereum away from proof of work (PoW) — paying miners gas for their work — to a proof-of-stake (PoS). This PoS approach will be allow a trusted consensus network to be created, and not one which is based on miners being paid for work. The next update — dubbed Berlin — is expected to be rolled out at the end of June 2020.

EIP 1344 guards against DDoS, and almost caused a major glitch when it was found that may Parity Ethereum systems had not been updated the day before the update:

This discovered that over 50% of the Parity Ethereum clients— which has around 23% of the clients on the whole network — and Geth clients had not been updated. A lack of updating could have caused the Ethereum blockchain to double spend on transactions. Luckily the message resulted in a major update, and where most of the nodes are now updated [here]:

EIP 152 allows for the integration with PoW of other cryptocurrencies. The other EIPs focus on gas costs - including lower gas costs — and the support enhanced privacy mechanisms (with zk-SNARKs).

Many thought that the price of Ether would rise significantly, but it increased for a few hours, but has since settle back to its pre-fork value:

Conclusions

Not many systems can keep going while being updated, but we now have a major machine that cannot be stopped, so we are patching it as we go along. Every update makes it one bit better. For many, the fork was an exciting step forward: