Ethereum is only one day away from a hard fork, but miners are not enthusiastic about voting

In response to the DAO attack, the Ethereum team announced an emergency hard fork plan. The result of a previous token vote was: approximately 3.96 million ether voted in favor of the hard fork (accounting for 87% of the total votes).

It is reported that this hard fork proposal did not actually roll back the transaction history of the Ethereum network, but allowed the original investors of The DAO to withdraw their Ethereum funds through a new smart contract.

According to a recent blog post, holders of DAO tokens will be able to withdraw their ether at an exchange rate of 1 ETH to 100 DAO tokens.

Major Ethereum exchanges have also announced their plans to deal with this hard fork. Generally speaking, the plan is to support the longest chain, which will be determined by the computing power of the Ethereum miner network. So far, digital currency exchanges Poloniex and Kraken have said that they will suspend Ethereum deposits and withdrawals before the fork is activated.

As Geth, Parity, and Mist software have successively released codes containing hard forks, everyone's attention is on Ethereum miners.

But so far, miners do not seem to be very enthusiastic about this hard fork.

(Hard fork voting statistics by r/ethereum community member econoar)

Miner voting

Ethpool and Ethermine are the first two Ethereum mining pools to open voting. Although the proportion of support for hard forks in the voting computing power has reached 42.6% and 75.6% respectively, as of now, the computing power participation of the two mining pools is not high, and the computing power that did not participate in the voting accounts for more than 70%.

(As of press time, only 29% of the hashrate of ethpool participated in the vote, and 57.58% of the hashrate that has voted supports the hard fork. Data source: http://ethpool.org/stats/votes)

(Only 16% of Ethermine’s hashrate participated in the vote. Among the hashrate that has voted, 75.6% supports the hard fork. Data source: http://ethermine.org/stats/votes)

Peter from Ethpool/Etherminer told reporters:

“Based on the results of this vote, all mining nodes will be upgraded on Tuesday. We will closely monitor the actual fork on Wednesday to quickly respond to any possible issues.”

Dwarfpool, currently the largest Ethereum mining pool (1288.250Gh/s), has a computing power of 83.85% that has not voted, and only 13.76 % of the computing power has voted in favor of the hard fork, indicating that the computing power that does not support it accounts for 2.39%.

(Data source: https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting)

Nanopool currently accounts for about 4% (212.3 Gh/s) of the mining power. For this hard fork, the computing power that voted in favor of the hard fork was 4,174.6 Mh/s, and the computing power that did not support it was 320.2 Mh/s.

Coinotron, which controls about 5% of the hashrate (231 Ghash/s), told CoinDesk that they will follow the vote and switch to the branch selected by voters.

It is worth noting that Shenyu, the founder of the Chinese mining pool F2Pool (766 Ghash/s), also expressed his position on this hard fork:

“We do not agree with fast hard forks that may cause security risks, but we have to support hard forks that are supported by the vast majority of hashrate and will not affect the income of ETH miners.”

Foreign media reporters have also contacted BW. Currently, the computing power held by the mining pool accounts for 15% of the entire network (685.43 Ghash/s), but they are unwilling to provide comments on the hard fork, on the grounds that time is too short and they cannot answer their position on the hard fork for the time being.

As of now, neither of the two major Chinese mining pools has opened hard fork voting.

In summary, the total computing power of those who explicitly voted to support the hard fork is about 355.18 Ghash/s, 约占全网算力的9.56%，明确投票不支持硬分叉的算力总和约为 107.353Ghash/s，约占全网算力的2.889%，剩余未投票的算力约占87.661% 。

Interestingly, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong seems very optimistic about this hard fork:

“If Ethereum pulls off this hard fork, it’s a positive sign for the Ethereum team. It shows that they are willing to listen to the community… I’d say there’s an 80% chance that they can pull it off.”

Followed by a comment from WhalePanda ‏@WhalePanda:

“Yes, very professional. Three days before the hard fork, the developer released the client. Now there is only one day left for the community, but only 30% of the nodes have upgraded. The community does not want this hard fork.”

It is reported that the scheduled activation of this hard fork will be at block 1,920,000, which is approximately Wednesday of this week, just one day away.

If a hard fork does happen, what should Ethereum users pay attention to? Here is a survival guide:

After the fork, two chains will be generated: one chain executes the geth 1.4.10 code, and the other chain does not. After this, one of the chains will become the dominant chain, and the other branch will gradually lose support, or the weak chain can continue to exist, and even maintain a market price (generating two ethers, one ether is valuable, and the other ether has no value, or is of lower value.)

If you only care about which branch will be dominant, then you should pay attention to the time of block 1920000, which is the moment when the hard fork occurs. It is clear which branch will be dominant (some exchanges will take action and suspend deposits for 1 hour). If you care about both branches, then you can use this contract (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4t9jv5/a_contract_to_conditionally_send_ether_to_another/) to send your ether to different branch accounts (contract code: http://etherscan.io/address/0xb671c3883307cf05bb3dff77a9754e87b4347195#code). If you continue to use separate accounts on different branches after this, you will be safe from transaction replay attacks.