HARD FORK AT BLOCK 178500 (around 20th September 2018)We are reaching out to notify you about the upcoming changes in the algorithms that will require your attention and
ACTION!
WHAT IS A HARD FORK?A very nice explanation of the concept of a hard fork in general can be found
HERE.
In short, it means that the
coin software has been modified in a way that it produces data (blocks) which the existing software will see as invalid, because we “changed a rule”, so the existing software would continue playing according to the old rules and will therefore disagree with what the new version would do. This “rule change” is scheduled at a certain point in time (actually: block height). The new software will know about that and continue playing by the old rules until that point and then switch to the new rules.
Therefore,
it is very important that all users of the coin have updated their software before that date, because after that date
(block 178500), the network will no longer support the old versions because the rules will have changed.
People not upgrading until that date will experience problems because they will either not be able to synchronize with the network anymore or will start living in a “bubble” of other people with the old version, separated from the main network, meaning that any coins they spend or receive will not be accepted by the majority of the others.
WHAT WILL CHANGE WITH THE HARD FORK? 1) MINING (PoW) ALGORITHM - The previous algorithm was the original “CryptoNight” (in variant 0). The
new algorithm is “CryptoNight Lite V1” (in some places also known as “CryptoNight Lite V7”). This brings two benefits:
- The “Lite” version of CryptoNight has lower hardware requirements, allowing easier access to mining on mobile and IoT devices (using the Linux miner).
- The “variant 1” is a modification of the original algorithm which none of the known ASICs are compatible with. This makes BitcoiNote stay ASIC-resistant.
2) ADJUSTMENT OF MAXIMUM BLOCK SIZE AND REWARD PENALTY ALGORITHM - We previously enlarged the so-called “full reward zone” for blocks, i.e. the maximum size of blocks for which miners will not get a reward penalty. This was done to allow larger transactions to be submitted, as we saw demand for this. However, because there is another dynamic in this picture, which is the slowly growing maximum cumulative size, we reached a situation where some very large transactions were accepted but then never included in a block at all (until they expired), leading to frustration with users. We now adjusted the algorithm so that larger blocks can be submitted (at the moment up to ~180,000 bytes), but also, too-large transactions will be rejected upfront to prevent the “stuck transactions” phenomenon.
WHO IS AFFECTED BY THIS AND HOW?Everybody. All the
GUI wallets will have to be updated.
UPDATE YOUR WALLET NOW!Users using the
Core software or other CLI tools like the
“simplewallet” utility (for example exchanges) will have to update these as well.
UPDATE CORE!Furthermore, pool owners will additionally have to update the
“node-multihashing” and
“node-cryptonote-utils” libraries to modified versions which we are now providing.
UPDATE NODE-MULTIHASHING and
NODE-CRYPTONOTE-UTILS!
HOW DO I UPDATE MY WALLET?Simply
download the new version of the wallet and use it instead of the old one. Your coins will be taken over to the new version. You should not use the old version afterwards anymore, it’s best to delete it once you verified that the new version works for you.
HOW WILL MINING CHANGE?i) If you are using the GUI wallet for mining, you just need to update it to our latest version.
ii) If you are using a third party tool, you need to check if it supports the algorithm “CryptoNight Lite V1” (sometimes called V7 instead of V1) and use the new algorithm after block 178500. For “xmr-stak-miner” for example, you can select algorithm “cryptonight_lite_v7”.
iii) If you are using an ASIC, you are out of luck, and that was precisely our goal.
iv) You also need to check if the pool that you are using is ready for the hard fork. If you are unsure, you can use our own pool (pool.bitcoinote.org).
