Ethereum Istanbul hard fork scheduled for early December

On December 4, Ethereum developers will roll out the long-awaited Ethereum update, the Istanbul hard fork. Istanbul promises to make the network faster, cheaper and more efficient.

Critics of Ethereum have become louder in recent months, accusing developers of spreading a promising “global computer” narrative, and then not delivering any ready-made applications for the market.

But that can be changed. IN two tweetspublished last week, Ethereum core developer Peter Cilagi said the long-awaited hard fork will start with block number 9069000, which is expected to be mined on December 4.

The network fixes contained in Istanbul are a key milestone in the Ethereum scalability roadmap and promise to make the blockchain faster and cheaper to use without sacrificing the principle of decentralization.

However, ambitious modernization plans have sparked criticism. Some stakeholders are wary of radical changes to the 20 billion-dollar blockchain network, which already hosts hundreds of projects.

Road to Ethereum 2.0

The Istanbul hard fork is the first of two major network upgrades planned over the next six months that will release Ethereum 2.0 – also known as Serenity.

These updates consist of 14 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that have been reduced from the original batch of 38. Six of the proposals will be implemented in the first part of Istanbul on December 4, while the remaining eight are still subject to discussion by core developers have been delayed for the second part of Istanbul - Berlin - scheduled for January 2020.

When the updates are completed, Ethereum is expected to be significantly faster and will rely on an agreed confirmation of participation algorithm to verify transactions instead of confirming work.

Istanbul lays the foundation for this transition and introduces several new core features. They include functionality for introducing sharding, which will improve the speed and throughput of ETH transactions; measures to reduce gas costs; Improved Zcash privacy coin chain compatibility; and smart contracts that allow more creative features.

Controversial Proposals

EIP 1884 is the most controversial change and will make the cost of recalling Ethereum data more expensive than before.

The increase in the board is designed to protect the blockchain from potential spam attacks that can overload the network and create delays for legitimate users. However, some dapp developers remain convinced that they will face both increased transaction costs and unnecessary failures. Aragon's decentralized management platform said the update was a “bad compromise” that would violate 680 smart contracts on the platform.

In its блогеwritten during a recent DevCon conference in Osaka, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin offered an answer to these questions.

“If you are a developer, you can eliminate most of the disruptions due to changes in gas cost by first making sure you are not writing applications with high witness sizes, i.e. measure the total number of storage slots + contracts + contract code accessed in a single transaction and make sure they are not too large,” writes Buterin.

Other suggestions were more generally welcomed, such as EIP 1108, which provides for re-evaluating arithmetic calculations based on an elliptic curve on Ethereum. This update is intended to help with scalability and take advantage of privacy protocols built on Ethereum by optimizing gas payments and will make using ZK-SNARK and other privacy applications like Zether and AZTEC cheaper to use on Ethereum .

However, the most controversial proposals for modernization were reserved for the second part of Istanbul - Berlin.

These include EIP 1057, also known as ProgPoW, which will make the Ethereum ASIC robust by replacing the Ethash health check function. This change may be popular on large mining farms using GPUs, but it raises doubts among critics who are wondering why the health check algorithm is changing right before the planned move to check rates.

Other issues, including the layout feature described by Buterin as “the ability of different applications to easily communicate with each other” and the potential security issues associated with creating a bridge between the two blockchains, were addressed in a series of four blogs. Messages written by Vitalik at the annual Devcon Platform Developers Conference.

Buterin said that the ability to layout “to a large extent” would remain unchanged and that although a safe one-way bridge between two block chains is possible, the complexity of the two-way bridge is unlikely to be developed, as it could pose a security risk.

Although upgrading is a big step in the right direction, Buterin also warned that Ethereum 2.0 may need to function as a separate blockchain for many years before it can fully merge with Ethereum 1.0.

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