Ethereum's Upgrades: Why Constantinople Fork Is So 'Hard' to Implement

What is ConstantinopleThe upcoming Constantinople hard fork includes five different Ethereum Improvement Proposals to smooth the transition from PoW to PoS. Once released, they would fundamentally change the Ethereum blockchain via a host of new upgrades, which prevent any backwards compatibility, meaning that nodes must either update synchronically with the entire system or carry on running as a separate blockchain entity.

The Constantinople hard fork includes changes to Ethereum's underlying mining economic policy and the delay of the "Difficulty Bomb", aimed at making the production of new blocks more complex and unfavourable.

This is a set of code programmed to trigger the so-called "Ethereum Ice Age", the main purpose of which is to make mining unprofitable and promote transition to PoS. The Ethereum Ice Age is designed to ensure that all participants switch to the new network after a hard fork is implemented.

EIP 1052.May 2, 2018.A proposal by core developer Nick Johnson, allows the optimization of large-scale code executions on Ethereum.

In a nutshell, all five EIPS have impacts to Ethereum that affect a number of the wider goals and initiatives still to be managed after the final release of Constantinople.

Even after block 4,300,000 was mined, which was previously set as a starting point of the Constantinople launch, Schoedon explained that clients were "Using the wrong config" and were following the Byzantium protocol, which is what the Ethereum mainnet is built on today.

Recently added hashpower caused reduced block times and caused this hard fork to happen much earlier than expected on Saturday which is, by all means, the worst time for a hard fork.

Hard fork happened only 6 days after Geth release and 1 day after Parity Ethereum release, users had not enough time to upgrade.

During the meeting, the Ethereum Foundation team further discussed the Constantinople hard fork, which was announced on the official GitHub account of Ethereum.

In the interim, it remains to track the Constantinople progress and monitor the transition of the Ethereum blockchain into a PoS algorithm, which is required for the further development of the network, according to Vitalik Buterin.