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As the weeks roll by, we are getting closer to Ethereum’s major 2021 network upgrades. You may already have heard about either the Ethereum Berlin Hard Fork, scheduled for April, or the Ethereum London Hard Fork slated for July. In this article, we go through both of these Ethereum Network upgrades, along with the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that will be packaged with them. Read on for the ultimate guide to the Ethereum Berlin Hard Fork and the Ethereum London Hard Fork!
It has never been more important to keep an eye on the upcoming Ethereum network updates, with Ethereum recently reaching new all-time highs. Granted, Ethereum has not been the sole focus of the cryptocurrency sector in 2021. Roughly three months into the year, we’ve already witnessed a considerable Bitcoin bull run to over 60K as well as a surge of interest in NFT marketplaces such as Rarible and OpenSea. Moreover, 2021 has also seen the emergence of the Binance Smart Chain and a surge of interest in both BSC DeFi and BEP-20 tokens. This was largely precipitated by a massive increase in Ethereum gas fees. Enroll in Ivan on Tech Academy to understand all the latest crypto developments!
First of all, why do Ethereum network upgrades even matter? Well, those searching for the latest news on Ethereum or an Ethereum price prediction 2021 will likely have seen mentions of either Ethereum’s London fork or Ethereum’s Berlin fork, both scheduled for 2021. Although network upgrades like these are relatively technical, they can still be important for Ethereum fundamentals. So, what do the upcoming two Ethereum hard forks entail? In this article, we explain everything that’s packaged in the two forthcoming hard forks in an easily understood manner!
Ethereum Network upgrades are nothing new. Although we’re currently looking forward to the Ethereum Berlin Hard Fork in Q1 and the Ethereum London Hard Fork during the summer, these are nothing new. Long-time Ethereum followers will likely fondly remember historical Ethereum Network upgrades. For example, these include upgrades like the Ethereum Spurious Dragon, Ethereum Byzantium, Ethereum Constantinople, and the Ethereum St. Petersburg upgrades. In late 2019, the Ethereum Istanbul update was released, which was the last hard fork before Berlin.
Btc gets most of the hype and the opprobrium heaped on cryptocurrencies, leaving its younger and smaller sibling Ethereum in the shadows. But Ethereum is anything but small. Its market capitalization was roughly US $10 billion at press time, and it has an equally whopping energy footprint.
Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day.
“That’s just a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers—real people—whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff,” says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.
Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild’s energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum’s code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum’s new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.
Btc, Ethereum relies on a blockchain, which is a digital LEDGER of transactions maintained by a community of users. (It’s called a blockchain because new transactions are bundled into “blocks” of data and written onto the end of a “chain” of existing blocks that describe all prior transactions.) However, Buterin designed Ethereum to do more than securely maintain a ledger without a central authority. His vision was for Ethereum to become a global computer—one that’s decentralized, accessible to all, and essentially immune to downtime, censorship, and fraud.
What gives the Ethereum blockchain such potential is its ability to store data, support decisions, and automate the distribution of value. It manages these tasks through smart contracts, programs written by users or developers in Ethereum’s custom coding language. Smart contracts have obvious business applications, but the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud- computing platform.
That lofty vision clashes with Ethereum’s current reality. While there are some multimillion-dollar apps running on it, even Buterin says he suspects that Ethereum is consuming more resources than it returns in societal benefits.
Like most cryptocurrencies, Ethereum relies on a computational competition called proof of work (PoW) . In PoW, all participants race to cryptographically secure transactions and add them to the blockchain’s globally distributed ledger. It’s a winner-takes-all contest, rewarded with newly minted cryptocoins. So the more computational firepower you have, the better your chances to profit.
The problem is PoW mining is difficult by design. The idea is to prevent any one entity from controlling the blockchain. For example, if a bitcoin miner’s computer system had more than half of all the mining power on the network, that miner could perpetrate frauds, such as revising long- completed transactions. Bitcoin users would have little recourse because miners are anonymous.
In theory, PoW keeps mining a distributed affair. In practice, however, the development of application-specific ICs (ASICs) that accelerate mining, produced by a handful of chip fabs in China, has concentrated power over many cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum took the fight against concentrated power one step further by selecting a memory-intensive PoW algorithm for mining “ether,” as its value token is known. This ether-mining algorithm penalizes the use of ASICs.
What Ethereum’s PoW algorithm has not prevented, however, is explosive growth in the computing resources devoted to ether mining. The computational power directed at that task grew more than 25-fold in 2017, as the token’s value surged from $8 to $862 and mining firms built dedicated data centers full of general-purpose graphics processing units, which are well-suited to ether mining.
The resultant energy demand has created a backlash from environmentalists. Utilities and communities, meanwhile, see financial risk and opportunity costs if they cater to cryptocurrency miners that gobble up cheap electricity while creating few jobs. Serving miners may require utilities to make equipment upgrades, which could become superfluous if cryptocurrency prices crash and mining operations shut down.
I will be mineing till the last coin can be mined ive mined now since 2017 and dont plan on stopping just because eth is no longer mineable i shall just be moveing onto the next most profitale coin to mine at the time.
