Today Ethereum has launched the first Metropolis Hardfork - Byzantium !
The Fork went smoothly, all clients are updated, the old chain starved...
While the Bitcoin community is fearing another split by a hardfork, the Ethereum community once again "upgrades" through a hardfork in a comfortable way...
Byzantium, the first of the two Metropolis hardforks was activated today with block 4.370.000.
As it appears, the Fork was a complete success !
Every peer of Ethereum and anyone who runs a node - had to install an update to get on the right chain.
The updates are Geth 1.7.2, Parity 1.7.6,Harmony 1.2 .
Light wallets like Jaxx, Metamask, MyEthereumWallet or Exodus do not need to update, just as little hardware wallets as Trezor or Ledger.
(https://steemit.com/ethereum/@joshbreslauer/ethereum-wallets-an-overview)
Here you can monitor the Metropolis Byzantium Fork Status:
http://status.ethereum.org/
The Byzantium Fork mainly modifies some very technical parameters so that only the initiates will understand their full significance.
What changes are included in the Byzantium hard fork?
The following upgrades are included:
EIP 140 Addition of ‘REVERT’ opcode, which permits error handling without consuming all gas
EIP 658 Transaction receipts now include a status field to indicate success or failure
EIP 196 Elliptic curve addition and scalar multiplication on alt_bn128
and pairing checks EIP 197, permitting ZK-Snarks -and other cryptographic mathemagic™EIP 198Support for big integer modular exponentiation , enabling RSA signature verification and other cryptographic applications
EIP 211 Support for variable length return values
EIP 214 Addition of the ‘STATICCALL’ opcode, permitting non-state-changing calls to other contracts
EIP 100 Changes to the difficulty adjustment formula to take uncles into account (EIP 100)
EIP 649 Delay of the ice age / difficulty bomb by 1 year, and reduction of block reward from 5 to 3 ether
The second part of the Metroplis-Fork, "Constantinople", has not yet a fixed date, but is expected in 2018.
But It should be expected, however, that this fork at least partly build the foundations for the Casper Proof of Stake contract as well as Sharding.
So far, there is no sign of a minority fork according to current fork logs, and developers are celebrating the transition on social media.
Hard fork celebration!
