Ethereum core developer: Berlin hard fork will be postponed to August or later

According to Coindesk, Ethereum core developers have decided to postpone the development of the Berlin hard fork until August or later to give other clients a chance to increase their share of the network.

So many users rely on Ethereum clients that a bug could temporarily freeze the network — something a blockchain should never have. For this reason, Ethereum core developers have decided to postpone the Berlin hard fork again.

Geth is only one of 11 client specifications, but 79.44% of Ethereum nodes run on Geth, according to data from Ethereum Node. Developers worry that a serious bug could destroy Ethereum—especially as the network continues to roll out updates to Eth 1.x before the Eth 2.0 update. "Geth is the backbone of the network," said Peter Szilagyi, head of the Geth team, at a full core developer group meeting in June. "It's very important that we get it right because we can't make mistakes."

A year after its launch in 2015, Ethereum has eight complete languages ​​at varying levels. The Ethereum Foundation currently lists clients in five languages, including Go, Solidity, Java, JavaScript, and Python.

However, just like human languages, every programming language has its nuances and therefore flaws in its implementation. These nuances can lead to bugs when Ethereum developers make updates.

“The main reason (for delaying Berlin) is to reduce the dependency on Geth, allowing it to crash without bringing down the entire network,” independent developer Alexey Akhunov said in a conversation. “The burden is too high at the moment because Geth correctness is so critical and they end up doing most of the work to make sure everything works correctly.”

Original address: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-developers-delay-berlin-hard-fork-to-stem-client-centralization-concerns