ambcrypto.com
During the recent Ethereum Core Developer live meeting, the topics the team discussed included the Ropsten fork for Constantinople and the Programmatic Proof-of-Work [ProgPow]. The discussion led by Hudson Jameson, the communications officer of the Foundation, included Afri Schoedon, Lane Rettig, Martin Holst Swende, Ben Burns, Zak Cole, Brooklyn Zelenka and other key developers of the foundation.
The team started the meeting by discussing the Ropsten fork for Constantinople. Here, at the time of discussion, the fork was around 3,000 blocks away and only one fork is going to occur on the network, unlike the two forks decided for Constantinople, with the other fork named Petersburg.
The second fork was introduced to disable the Ethereum Improvement Protocol in which issues were identified hours before the previous schedule for Constantinople that was set to occur in January 2019. The updated version for both Geth and Parity was released by the respective teams this week.
The Geth team posted on Github:
“Geth v1.8.22 re-enables all Constantinople changes and contains an additional fork, Petersburg, to disable EIP-1283. This procedure is meant to ease the transition on networks like Ropsten where the Constantinople transition had already taken place when an issue with EIP-1283 was discovered. On the main network, Constantinople and Petersburg activate at the same time.”
Afri Schoedon, hard fork co-ordinator and release manager at Parity, also Tweeted about the new version of Parity that supports both Constantinople and Petersburg:
“Parity Ethereum 2.2.8 stable and 2.3.1 beta arrived. This enables Constantinople and St. Petersfork. Upgrading is mandatory for Ethereum, Kovan, Ropsten, Görli, POA Sokol, and POA Core networks.’
Martin Holst Swende, the security lead of the Ethereum Foundation, however, stated that there could be problems encountered during the Ropsten fork for Constantinople. This could be taking into account the previous fork on Ropsten, which was met with several issues because of the difference in Parity and Geth, and the lack of miners for Ropsten.
This was followed with the team discussing ProgPow. The proposal of ProgPow implementation was first made in 2018 because of the rising concern among miners over ASIC mining hardware on Ethereum. Currently, it has been decided that it would be best to perform third-party audits on ProgPow to test whether the claims of ProPow reducing ASIC efficiency stands true and to ensure that their team would not encounter any problems during its launch on the Mainnet.