Ethereum miners reach final decision on hard fork, blockchain history episode is expected to end

Nearly 60% of Ethereum miners have upgraded to support Ethereum’s historic hard fork, reaching a decisive and final decision that satisfies the wishes of Ethereum holders, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of a hard fork, with 87% in favor of returning stolen Ethereum assets to their rightful owners.

All the major mining pools in the Western world held a vote to demonstrate a new management system for the blockchain space. Overall, 80% of miners participated in the vote, and 85% of miners from Dwarfpool, the largest Ethereum mining pool, voted in favor of the hard fork.

In contrast, F2pool and BW, two Chinese mining pools, did not vote, but made a unilateral decision, which concentrated power in the operators of the two mining pools, which is contrary to the basic principles of blockchain decentralization and decentralization. Despite this, they are still the most likely to upgrade, as it has been confirmed that about 60% of miners have upgraded to support the hard fork.

Therefore, the forked chain will be the longest one and supported by all exchanges. The abandoned chain will completely lose its security and can be easily attacked by any miner. Therefore, the abandoned chain will not have any market value.

Voting Operation

Just yesterday there were a few really nerve-wracking hours when the Ethpool vote shifted dramatically in a matter of hours, leading to a short-term market sell-off. The mining pool hashrate surged at the time, providing clear evidence of vote manipulation:

Ethpool operators cleared up any uncertainty and made it absolutely clear that they support the hard fork:

“We will support the hard fork based on the voting policy we outlined in our announcement.”

Final decision

Now that the final decision has been reached, all node operators need to urgently upgrade their default settings, or if asked to choose, they should choose the hard fork chain. All non-pool miners need to do the same. Miners who fail to do so need to ensure that their nodes or mining equipment are disconnected from the network and put into a non-operational state until the Ethereum network or almost all exchanges have completed the fork.

If you don't run a node or are a pool miner, then you don't need to do anything except avoid transacting within an hour of block 1,920,000, which will be mined on July 20, 2016 at noon CET, morning UT, or evening UT. If you must transact during this time, make sure you are completely safe from the excessive number of transactions waiting to be confirmed.

The hard fork may actually happen because the majority of miners are now fully in favor of the hard fork and their lead is enough to ensure that the forked chain wins. Therefore, all other miners may upgrade today. So, the transition may be very smooth.

Finally, one of the most interesting episodes in the 8-year history of blockchain will come to an end, during which the community reacted quickly, organized and implemented solutions, avoided a disaster, formed a new governance model, learned lessons from it, and continued to build new things with the most cutting-edge blockchain technology.