Ethereum "fork" mystery

Consensus is not just about reaching an agreement, but more importantly, it is about being able to change things around you.

Source: 12 Angry Men

On November 11, as a consensus error occurred on the Ethereum mainnet, the entire Ethereum network encountered problems.

Users running older versions of geth nodes found themselves stuck on a minority fork, setting off a chain reaction that affected all apps that relied on those nodes.

Most users became aware of the problem after the Infura API was partially down. Infura is the largest node provider on the Ethereum network, providing tools and infrastructure for some of the most commonly used Web 3.0 apps and centralized exchanges, such as Metamask, Uniswap, and Binance.

The Infura outage incident shows that Binance either relies on Infura data or runs old nodes. In any case, both situations are inappropriate for such an important trading platform. (Note from Ludong, there was a potential hard fork problem/double spending at the time, in order to ensure the safety of user funds.)

While it may seem odd that Infura is not running the latest version of geth, it is understandable that such a large-scale operator is in no rush to migrate to the latest version. Just as in the absence of this hard fork, there is no urgent reason to switch from a stable working version to a new unknown version.

Block explorer and analytics engine Blockchair also experienced issues, tweeting the following:

We have encountered an issue with our Ethereum explorer and are working on a fix. It appears there was a hard fork and some nodes (including ours and some miners) are stuck on the minority chain.

Nikita Zhavonronkov, lead developer at Blockchair, reported receiving the following error:

########## BAD BLOCK #########<…>Error: invalid merkle root (remote:57cc91ee8b91b956592a27b14386abc2aba723b5f4f9e5d3181ace6b5d3cd433 local: 1f9ee59bfa683a25c7a15b626995a3ad7c58c571b40df96eea31e5c5eed9732d)

Two serious vulnerabilities were discovered in the geth network, both discovered by John Youngseok Yang (Software Platform Lab), who received 20,000 points on the Ethereum Bounty Program leaderboard.

To avoid being exploited, the consensus flaw is not publicly discussed on Github Issues, so the specific details of the vulnerability are unclear. For those who are looking forward to more technical details, Mhswende said: There will most likely be a report on this issue in the future.

To minimize disruption, Ethereum developers decided to hard fork.

As Péter Szilagyi said on Twitter:

This was an "unannounced hard fork" (from a bad chain to a good chain). That said, quietly fixing a bug that has been dormant for over two years is much less likely to cause damage than raising awareness of it. We try to minimize the potential damage as much as possible.

For anyone complaining about Infura going out of service, this incident should serve as a wake-up call: keep your node up to date. Because once you delegate your node to another party, it is entirely up to them to decide how to deal with related issues.

Infura has been transparent and open about the entire incident, and is clearly working to resolve the issue.

Infura is now back online and you can find status updates here.

The Infura outage made many of us realize how reliant we are on this single centralized provider of services that serve as the gatekeepers of our decentralized ecosystem.

After this incident, both individuals and institutions need to give more consideration to their future development.

We cannot rely on Infura so much. Due to MetaMask's default reliance on centralized node providers, the entire Ethereum network temporarily became somewhat deserted, with GAS fees reduced to only 12gwei. This is evidence of unhealthy dependence and clearly shows the potential harm that such dependence can cause.

Isn’t failure caused by relying on errors from a single centralized organization exactly what we want to avoid in a digital/blockchain society?

We’ve built a free internet, but handed it over to a small group of centralized institutions — Chrome, Safari, and Brave… We’ve built an alternative internet where the original values ​​of anonymity and decentralization still exist, yet we label it the dark web and restrict access.

We cannot let the same thing happen to cryptocurrencies.

David Mihal wrote:

Today's Infura outage has left users scrambling to find another RPC provider. You can try http://ethereumnodes.com, which lists public free RPCs and their current status.

Michael O Rourke points out:

If Metamask is down, you can change the RPC provider to Pocket using the following URL

https://eth-mainnet.gateway.pokt.network/v1/5f3453978e354ab992c4da79…

Any failure to reach consensus will lead to serious problems. An undisclosed hard fork showed that these vulnerabilities, if not controlled, could cause great harm to the Ethereum network.

Fortunately, thanks to the keen observation of bug bounty hunters and the diligent work of Ethereum developers, no damage was done, and as Nikita Zhavonronkohov wrote on Twitter, the fix looks to be fairly simple….