After a smooth launch, find some important updates below. These will probably be of interest only to the most advanced users among you; if you are not a miner, there is nothing to do.
Change of season in 2 hours
Let’s start with a quick notice to miners, the network will change epochs in about 2 hours. If you’re using the geth/ethminer combo, you should be good to go if you’ve opted to use the –autodag flag in geth and –without previous calculation in etminer. If not, keep an eye on your miners while they generate the day. Report all problems to Go either C++ issue repositories, depending on the client you are using.
Please note that some AMD cards will require GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=95 to support for the larger DAG size.
Client updates on the horizon.
Within the next few days, we will see the 5k gas per block limit lifted. We will be operating with a gas target of 3M (3141592, or pi million as it is affectionately called) per block going forward.
Remember that it is the protocol that defines the limits of how much you can increase (or decrease) the gas limit per block, and that miners can only adjust their parameters within these limits.
The maximum increase (or decrease) is set by the protocol at the main gas limit /1024. With the default setting unaffected by miners, it will take a minimum of 6 hours to go from the current 5k gas per block to a limit that allows transactions (21,000 gas required for a single Ethereum transaction).
Of course, statistically speaking, the more miners update their clients when the update is released, the faster the network will reach the 3M target (minimum is 28 hours). So if you are mining, keep an eye out for releases from both C++ Y Go clients and be sure to update as soon as they arrive.
The default price of gasoline is set to 50 shannon
The default gasoline price is set to 50 shannon (0.05 fixed, or 0.00000005 ether). Remember that ultimately the gas price is always defined by the users requesting a contract, while miners can set a parameter on their machines to accept or ignore transactions that have a gas price within a certain range.
On the user side, we also have a built-in oracle that defines the optimal gas price, determined by the previous block’s gas usage. For example, if the previous block was less than 80% full, the gas price oracle will adjust to a lower gas price recommendation.
Olympic Rewards Update
We are currently compiling the list of Olympic winners and will process them over the next few weeks.
If you are expecting an Olympic reward and you were unable to perform the A->B transaction that I covered in one of my previous blog postsdon’t panic – you can still run that transaction on the olympic network.
Some of you reported problems catching up with the Olympic blockchain; in this case try the C++ client which syncs in less than 5 hours. Keep in mind that you may need to mine a few blocks for your transaction to go through, as the miners have now, understandably, moved to Frontier.
Update in name registry
Once the thaw is complete, we’ll look to add the name registrar contract. We haven’t finalized his behavior yet, and his behavior (similar to an auction house) probably deserves its own blog post. You can check your current code posted at https://github.com/ethereum/dapp-bin/blob/master/registrar/registrar.sol.
Announcements will always be made on our blog
We thank you for your incredible support and engagement on social media, including Twitter and of course Reddit. Please note that since many of you are crawling some sites for information about Ethereum, we decided to post all future announcements, including changes to the protocol or clients, on this blog (the one you are reading now). Finally, keep in mind that if you need answers to technical questions, you will always be better served by our forums at http://forum.ethereum.org/.
