The Constantinople upgrade to Ethereum, which failed to correctly run on the Ropsten testnet and caused an accidental fork, has already been patched. The open-source developer team seem in no hurry to try again, however, preferring to wait until the Ethereum Devcon4 conference in Prague is complete.
Constantinople, when it arrives, will aim to bring Ethereum a step closer to proof-of-stake consensus (PoS) as the Ethereum blockchain currently uses the proof-of-work consensus. It will be one of the final steps to implementing the Casper PoS algorithm, which has been in the works for over three years.
The update will also delay the so-called Ethereum difficulty bomb, and reduce the PoW mining reward from three to two eth – a controversial change among Ethereum miners.
Not enough mining power, and not enough nodes running the right version, seem to be contributing factors to the accidental fork, according to Afri Schoedon, developer for the Ethereum Parity network.
Lane Rettig, another Ethereum developer, is however explicit in pointing out that the fault was ultimately a bug in the consensus algorithm:
This is a consensus bug and it caused geth and parity to fork. (So, if you’re keeping count, there were now three Ropsten chains: Ropsten Classic, Ropsten geth, and Ropsten parity 🤓)
— Lane Rettig (@lrettig) October 15, 2018
So what happens now?
This begs the important question: what happens to Constantinople now? As @5chdn and @jutta_steiner have pointed out, it’s likely going to be delayed since we need to be as conservative as possible about mainnet upgrades. But there was no set date for it, anyway.
— Lane Rettig (@lrettig) October 15, 2018
The target range for a renewed attempt at testnet success is currently late November to January, at any rate before February, according to a developer post on the Ethereum reddit page. But as always, the targets are subject to change.
Schoedon commented on reddit:
“Parity can accomplish this in 2018, too, if we drop dead in our tracks and don’t go to Prague, but Ethereum is much more than two client developer teams. We have a dozen clients. Why on earth would anyone want to rush this?”
