Who’s Forking What?
The Ethereum core developers are forking Ethereum’s incumbent chain.
Byzantium is the first part of the major, two-part network upgrade known as “Metropolis”
Vitalik Buterin and the rest of the core developers have divided Metropolis into two phases: Byzantium and Constantinople.
Both phases of Metropolis will lead to hard-forks, so Byzantium is the first of the two. When the Second Hard-Fork Constantinople hits is yet to be announced.
The trigger block number for the Byzantium fork is 4,370,000.
At the current Blocktime, this would be roughly at oct 16.
Why?
Byzantium provides new features for Ethereum, with these features being focused on:
improving performance (i.e. Higher transaction throughput)
Improving security
After the Byzantium fork, the network should move faster and be less prone to overflowing. Furthermore, this upgrade builds the foundation for new privacy upgrades coming soon.
Is This Anything Like the Bitcoin Forks? Can I Make Money Off the Fork?
No, and no.
The Byzantium upgrade has beyond super-majority consensus in the Ethereum community (all developers agree with each other), unlike the contentious scaling debate Bitcoiners are facing right now.
Accordingly, the old (but currently incumbent) Ethereum chain won’t have any mining power once this 1st phase of Metropolis goes live, rendering that chain obsolete.
What Does This mean for Ethers Price?
While Bitcoin FOMO/FUD before the coming hard forks will surely drive the market in the short-term, Ethereums latest upgrade, however, is allowing the price of Ether to rise in the mid-term.