Reflecting on the unexpected fork of Ethereum (ETH), this is how developers see it

A recent unexpected fork of the Ethereum (ETH) network has caused headaches for its investors.

By now, you may have heard or heard the term hard fork many times, which is a controversial way to update a public blockchain.

Some believe that hard forks are a necessary means of updating a blockchain network, while others believe that they are undesirable on the grounds that they break consensus and require everyone on the network to update to a new blockchain if they want to continue participating.

Ethereum (ETH) has executed three hard forks in the past few months to address its technical debt, but the latest fork is different because it was not executed with a purpose.

The problem at hand is that two of Ethereum’s most popular protocols, Geth and Parity, had a minor disagreement over the execution of a recent technical hard fork, which resulted in an unexpected chain split on Thanksgiving Day.

As a result, the price of ether has fallen to its lowest point since April, and Petar Zivkovski, operations director of Bitcoin leverage trading platform whaleclub, called the new challenges an "identity crisis."

In the middle of summer, The DAO collapsed due to a hacker attack, and the following months were difficult for smart contract platforms.

However, Ethereum developers remain optimistic, viewing the unexpected fork on Thanksgiving as another learning experience and opportunity to make the Ethereum network better.

Developer Response

According to people involved in the Ethereum (ETH) project, the team is currently looking for measures to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

“This time, it took us six minutes to detect the fork, which was a bit of luck,” Martin Holst Swende, head of security at the Ethereum Foundation, told reporters.

Therefore, they want to ensure that they can respond quickly in similar situations.

“We are improving our detection, analysis, team communication and collaboration capabilities,” Swende said.

He also added that the team is working on a “post-mortem” report outlining lessons learned from various ethereum vulnerabilities, which they aim to make available to the public soon.

Hudson Jameson, head of media relations at the Ethereum Foundation, revealed that developers also plan to thoroughly examine the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP).

“We also plan to create an alternative web interface for listed Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), so that regular users can more easily view these EIPs without having to visit the GitHub repos, which can be confusing in many cases,” he explained.

Repair split forks

Ethereum’s recent technical hard fork, Spurious Dragon Dragon, fixed several issues with Ethereum (ETH), including deleting empty accounts that attackers used to attack the ETH blockchain.

Over the past week, Ethereum developers have used this new feature to delete all related empty accounts, a process that was officially completed on Wednesday. But in the 2686351 block of the process, a developer tried to delete an empty account but did not use enough gas.

This is also the reason for the slight disagreement between Geth and Parity. Geth deleted the empty account, but Parity did not, causing the Ethereum (ETH) network to temporarily split in two.

The latest version of Geth fixes this problem.

“If you don’t update, please be aware that the chain you’re on is not supported, it’s invalid,” Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded after the fork (a comment that also attracted a lot of criticism, as Buterin had already announced which chain was invalid.)

Additionally, Buterin attributed the problem to Geth, but other developers disagreed.

Geth developer Péter Szilágyi responded at the time, “We are trying to introduce Parity’s vulnerability into Geth, so there is no need to roll back the blockchain…”

Despite some minor infighting among Ethereum developers, the Ethereum community still sees it as an opportunity for growth.

The ‘threat’ of blockchain

However, some believe that the issue of forks will continue to affect the ambitions of smart contract blockchains. For some, the above issue can be traced back to a debate between the anonymous creator of Bitcoin six years ago.

“I don’t think a second, compatible version of Bitcoin would be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes being able to keep pace and have completely consistent results, and a second version of the network is a threat to the original network,” Satoshi Nakamoto said in a discussion with former Bitcoin Core chief maintainer Gavin Andresen.

One potential "threat" is that every client on the network needs to maintain nearly identical functionality, even if they are written in different languages. If a bug occurs (such as Ethereum's recent fork, which was caused by a minor disagreement over the deletion of empty accounts), the network could split.

Chromaway co-founder and CTO Alex Mizrahi recently wrote that while multiple versions of forks can be considered a good thing in other cases, the risk of falling prices may indicate that it is not suitable for cryptocurrency.

To some, a fork is an inevitable outcome, but since Bitcoin and Ethereum are seen as competing, it is difficult to determine the honesty behind this analysis.

Since Ethereum does not have a broad user base, it is unlikely to affect many people. In this case, miners who accidentally continue to mine the "wrong" chain may have a lot to lose. Transactions sent by anyone on the wrong chain may not be completed.

Finally, a similar incident on a more widely used platform would likely be more concerning.