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Greetings Steemians! Wonderful news coming down the grapevine for Ethereum. Based on current block times, it is highly likely that we will reach Block 1,700,000, which will trigger the Byzantium Hard Fork on the ropsten testnet. However this is just the first iteration, with the actual network upgrades being performed October 9th. Why is there a hard fork? This is because the actual ethereum code-base/source-code is being changed, which will require a network hard fork in order to successfully implement.

The Metropolis upgrade will be accomplished in two hard forks, the first of which being called the Byzantium Fork, proposes solutions to The Byzantine Generals Problem which is a framework for understanding how to reach consensus within a group of nodes, some of which may be bad actor.

The actual Byzantium upgrades are scheduled to happen across the following 9 EIPs:

EIP 98 – Removal of intermediate state roots from receipts. Allows for parallel transaction processing.

EIP 658 – Embedding transaction return data in receipts. Allows light clients to verify if calls were executed correctly. Previously this could only be verified by a full-node.

EIP 100 – Change difficulty adjustment to target mean block time including uncles. Fixes block rewards for uncle blocks.

EIPs 198, 212 (197), 213 (196) – Precompiled contracts for modular exponentiation; elliptic curve addition, scalar multiplication and pairing. New cryptographic primitives enable ZK-Snarks. This will enhance privacy, security and scalability.

EIP 214 – Expanding the EVM with static contract calls. Fixes the problem that caused The DAO. Creates a safer, more defined way to call external EDCCs from within your EDCC.

EIP 211 – Expanding the EVM with dynamically sized data. Introduces two new opcodes: RETURNDATASIZE and RETURNDATACOPY. Enables forwarding EDCCs to return precisely what an underlying call returned. This step automates the hardcoding of how much memory is read from a call.

EIP 206 – Expanding the EVM with cheap state reverts. Gas expenditure update. By utilizing a revert instead of a throw, only the gas actually used is spent on a particular users transaction.

EIP 649 – Delaying the difficulty bomb and reducing the block reward. This delays Ice-Age by 18 months and reduces block rewards to three Ether. This is an effort to help ween the ecosystem off of proof-of-work.

EIP 684 – Preventing overwriting contracts. Byzantium is going to change the way EDCC addresses are created and this EIP makes sure no two EDCCs can occupy the same place on Ethereum.

So what are you thoughts? Will you be picking up more Ethereum pending the launch of Metropolis or will you be selling? Me personally I will be tripling my Ethereum position.

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