A quintet of upgrade packages are set to go live on the Ethereum blockchain network Thursday as part of the London hard fork.
“Hard fork” is software parlance for a backward-incompatible upgrade, meaning that post-London activation, if you want to stay connected to the Ethereum network, you’ll need to download London.
Thursday’s activation is the culmination of months of work and, at times, drama, particularly as it relates to one of the five Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs), called EIP-1559, that London contains. Earlier this year, upgrade proposal drew opposition from some mining pools, the operators of which argued that EIP-1559 would unfairly cut into their income.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s take a look at what’s actually coming with the London hard fork.
What the heck is London? And EIP-1559? What’s going on here?!
London is the overarching title for Thursday’s hard fork, which includes a total of five EIPs. For details on each part of the overall London suite, check out this post by the Ethereum Foundation from last month.
In sum, the main goal of London is to improve the quality of life for Ethereum users. For instance, though London isn’t going to make Ethereum cheaper to use,it does aim to make the cost of using Ethereum more predictable. The controversial proposal dubbed EIP-1559 was designed to achieve this.
EIP-1559 aims to adjust the makeup of Ethereum’s fee market. A blockchain fee market, simply put, is the function of transactors paying fees on their transactions and miners collecting those fees as they add these transactions to the chain.
The way it works now is that the higher the fee a transactor offers in a transaction, the more likely that transaction is likely to be included in a block quickly.
But EIP-1559’s authors contend this is inefficient, and so have proposed a way for block sizes to adjust depending on the degree of congestion on the network and for a “base fee” that either rises or falls based on existing demand. The adjustment of the block size allows for more transactions at a given time.
source of news:theblockcrypto
