With the constant denial of services attacks on Ethereum wallet, the developers have suggested a protocol upgrade. This will be known as the EIP150 Hard Fork, and the developers have already confirmed that it is coming.
Better than weekly hotfixesFor the past few weeks, the attacker(s) have been exploiting various issues with the Ethereum client. The developers then consistently respond with a quick hotfix to address the issue, only to have the network go down again hours later due to another attack vector being exploited. This left users very unhappy, since Ethereum nodes would crash every few hours as memory usage piled up on servers. Transactions would take hours or days to complete.
EIP150 Hard Fork StrategyVitalik Buterin has explained the changes to the Ethereum wallet EIP150 hard fork in this post. It basically involves changing the cost to make calls in smart contracts by 5-20x the previous amount. More intensive IO operations get a bigger boost in gas prices. As a result, the attacker will no longer be able to spam the network by making an enormous amount of opcode calls. It seeks to alleviate the current severity by up to 20x.
GitHub:
https://github.com/hofma100/ethcore/releases/tag/1.3.8No doubt the parasitic criminal leeches desperately trying to run the ETC Criminal Coin will cut and paste all the real hard work done on ETH. Dirty scabs.
