Why does Ethereum Hard Fork (Will Ethereum Fork)?

Why does Ethereum Hard Fork, why does Ethereum Hard Fork? Why does the Ethereum blockchain need to undergo a hard fork? Today, let’s talk about Ethereum’s hard fork.

What is a hard fork? It is not just upgrading to a new version of the protocol, but making significant changes and improvements to the old system. For example, reactivating the previous new network when the block height reaches 12,000,000 and improving security by restructuring the consensus algorithm. If there are problems, the entire functionality of the existing system can be reintroduced into the blockchain, achieving decentralization.

To avoid this situation, the Ethereum team decided to implement a hard fork upgrade, which is a new “soft” technical upgrade. This update is called ProgPoW (Proof of Work) and gained wide attention since it was first proposed by V God’s EIP-1559 proposal in May 2018. However, this upgrade also sparked criticism from the community. The Ethereum Foundation proposed two suggestions:

1. Miners must pay Gas fees for packing transactions for each new block; otherwise, it will fail.

2. Mining node operators do not need to provide Gas fees for every block. They only need to pay Gas fees to join this chain to maintain the network instead of burning them.

3. Miners only need to choose the most appropriate time for the hard fork.

So how to ensure that these changes do not have any impact? According to Ethereum developers, this move may lead to a decline in mining machine performance or a decrease in the cost of mining pool computing power. On the other hand, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also expressed support for this measure and is studying a solution.

However, since the inflation risk of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Tezos has not been taken into account, a hard fork may not be the best solution, and some projects have even started planning to launch similar solutions.

Fundamentally, Ethereum does not have any special advantages. For example, its token issuance method does not have the advantages that most people think, nor does it have enough market appeal, so many projects do not have the ability to completely replace mainstream currencies like Bitcoin. Instead, Ethereum 2.0 aims to change the proof-of-work mechanism of Bitcoin. The goal of Ethereum 2.0 is the way Ethereum 2.0 adopts, which is the use of proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. When Ethereum transitions to PoS, users can obtain staking rewards through smart contracts and use staked ETH as collateral. In other words, Ethereum 2.0 is coming soon.

The reason why Ethereum has a hard fork is that some miners have found the scalability of Ethereum insufficient and the problem of gas limitations.

One of the most important points is that for mining companies, the development of the Ethereum ecosystem is faster than other industries, especially those who want to succeed in the face of competitors.

Will Ethereum Fork?

Ethereum forking is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain community, and its importance for the development of the Ethereum ecosystem is beyond doubt. In a recent AMA event, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his views on how ETH 2.0 will affect its network. “This is not big news,” Buterin said. “I think if we put all the money in a single wallet (like Metamask), the project is likely to collapse.” However, when it comes to “why Ethereum forks,” he said, “Forks are actually not new because you never know what they’ve done.”