The Ethereum network will experience a hard fork at block number 2463000, which will likely occur between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer can be viewed at https://fork.codetract.io/.
As a user, what should I do?
Download the latest version of your Ethereum client:
What happens if I don’t participate in the hard fork?
If you are using an Ethereum client that is not up to date for the next hard fork, your client will be synchronized with the pre-fork blockchain once the hard fork occurs. You will be stuck on an incompatible chain following the above rules and will not be able to send ether or operate on the post-fork Ethereum network.
What is a hard fork in Ethereum-land?
A hard fork is a change to the underlying Ethereum protocol, which creates new rules to improve the system. All Ethereum clients need to update; otherwise they will be stuck in an incompatible chain following the rules above. The decentralized nature of blockchain systems makes upgrading from a hard fork more difficult. Hard forks on a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the community as well as the developers of the various Ethereum clients in order for the transition to go smoothly.
What happens during a hard fork?
Once a consensus is reached on which changes should be included in a hard fork, the changes to the protocol are written to the various Ethereum clients such as geth, Parity, and ethereumJ. Protocol changes are triggered on a specific block number. Any nodes that have not updated to the new rule set will be left in the old chain where the old rules will still exist.
Why do we need a hard fork?
Since September 18 (UTC), the Ethereum network has been attacked by an individual or group, causing long delays before transactions were processed. The network is currently full of pending transactions, which is causing delays for users in processing their transactions. You can think of this as a denial of service (DoS) attack on the Ethereum blockchain.
Each trade that makes an Ethereum contract on the network is assigned a gas price or fee. Using the ADD operation is less computationally expensive than performing a complex operation like encoding a number using SHA256. The attacker performed a DoS attack by repeatedly calling certain opcodes (opcodes) in their smart contracts that are computationally difficult for clients to process, but very cheap to add to the network. To prevent attackers from continuing to flood the network with low-priced contracts with high computational cost, we are increasing the price of certain operations.
Why are we making two hard forks and what will be the effects?
Each of the two hard forks addresses different issues that have arisen from the attacks. The first hard fork is intended to address urgent network health issues related to low-priced opcodes. As described in the Ethereum 150 Improvement Proposal, “EIP 150 Hard Fork”, the first hard fork is scheduled to occur at block number 2463000 and will adjust the price of the undervalued opcodes involved in the attack. The second fork is expected to address a number of less pressing issues, such as removing empty accounts that the attacker used to flood the Ethereum network, causing the size of the blockchain to inflate. The second hard fork is still being discussed.
After the second hard fork has been implemented, there will likely be a “cleanup period” during which there may be delays and difficulties processing transactions and synchronizing until the state of the blockchain has been completely removed.
How will the EIP 150 hard fork affect contracts?
See the following comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/57p0bv/a_quick_note_on_how_the_call_gas_cost_increase/
Where can I find more technical details about what the two new hard forks in the protocol will change?
The respective changes to the Ethereum protocol are documented in the GitHub repository for Ethereum improvement proposals
The following two EIPs describe the current plans for the upcoming hard forks:
A big thank you to the Ethereum community for their patience and understanding, and to all the Ethereum developers across all clients and platforms who came together to provide input, thoughts, and contributions to address stopping the attacks and helping improve the platform.
