Déjà vu? Although there isn’t a timeline yet, ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin today suggested that the platform’s developers may have to hard fork to once again solve pressing network problems. If pursued, the move would come less than three months after ethereum last executed a hard fork in a controversial bid to return funds to investors in The DAO . Despite the potential risks (last time, the upgrade didn’t go as planned ), the new fork seems to have initial support, as it is seen as a way to foil ongoing attacks on the network. In recent weeks, the ethereum blockchain has been barraged with a series of denial of service attacks , which have slowed transactions and caused nodes to crash. Exchanges like Kraken and ShapeShift have temporarily paused ether trades as a result. Because of this, developers are looking for a fast fix to the problem, which has acutely impacted clients including geth and Parity, in the form of a hard fork. Ethcore developer Marek Kotewicz, who works on the Parity client, noted that, a fork increasingly seems like the easiest option to stop the attacks. He told CoinDesk: "You know, no one likes hard forks, but that’s what I think we need to do." In the last month, developers of the Go-version ethereum client, Geth, have released six new versions to fix the various denial of service attacks to no avail But rather than continue to create new releases (the team has averaged one release every three days), the idea behind the hard fork is to resolve the network issues in one swoop. Uncontroversial but controversial But it’s important to note that this hard fork will likely be different than the one executed in the wake of the failure of The DAO. As many ethereum developers […]
