| FORK_BLKNUM | CHAIN_NAME |
|---|---|
| 1,150,000 | Main net |
| 494,000 | Morden |
| 0 | Future testnets |
If block.number >= HOMESTEAD_FORK_BLKNUM, do the following:
CREATE opcode is unaffected.secp256k1n/2 are now considered invalid. The ECDSA recover precompiled contract remains unchanged and will keep accepting high s-values; this is useful e.g. if a contract recovers old Bitcoin signatures.block_diff = parent_diff + parent_diff // 2048 * (1 if block_timestamp - parent_timestamp < 13 else -1) + int(2**((block.number // 100000) - 2)) (where the int(2**((block.number // 100000) - 2)) represents the exponential difficulty adjustment component) to block_diff = parent_diff + parent_diff // 2048 * max(1 - (block_timestamp - parent_timestamp) // 10, -99) + int(2**((block.number // 100000) - 2)), where // is the integer division operator, eg. 6 // 2 = 3, 7 // 2 = 3, 8 // 2 = 4. The minDifficulty still defines the minimum difficulty allowed and no adjustment may take it below this.Currently, there is an excess incentive to create contracts via transactions, where the cost is 21,000, rather than contracts, where the cost is 32,000. Additionally, with the help of suicide refunds, it is currently possible to make a simple ether value transfer using only 11,664 gas; the code for doing this is as follows:
This is not a particularly serious problem, but it is nevertheless arguably a bug.
Allowing transactions with any s value with 0 < s < secp256k1n, as is currently the case, opens a transaction malleability concern, as one can take any transaction, flip the s value from s to secp256k1n - s, flip the v value (27 -> 28, 28 -> 27), and the resulting signature would still be valid. This is not a serious security flaw, especially since Ethereum uses addresses and not transaction hashes as the input to an ether value transfer or other transaction, but it nevertheless creates a UI inconvenience as an attacker can cause the transaction that gets confirmed in a block to have a different hash from the transaction that any user sends, interfering with user interfaces that use transaction hashes as tracking IDs. Preventing high s values removes this problem.
Making contract creation go out-of-gas if there is not enough gas to pay for the final gas fee has the benefits that:
The difficulty adjustment change conclusively solves a problem that the Ethereum protocol saw two months ago where an excessive number of miners were mining blocks that contain a timestamp equal to parent_timestamp + 1; this skewed the block time distribution, and so the current block time algorithm, which targets a median of 13 seconds, continued to target the same median but the mean started increasing. If 51% of miners had started mining blocks in this way, the mean would have increased to infinity. The proposed new formula is roughly based on targeting the mean; one can prove that with the formula in use, an average block time longer than 24 seconds is mathematically impossible in the long term.
The use of (block_timestamp - parent_timestamp) // 10 as the main input variable rather than the time difference directly serves to maintain the coarse-grained nature of the algorithm, preventing an excessive incentive to set the timestamp difference to exactly 1 in order to create a block that has slightly higher difficulty and that will thus be guaranteed to beat out any possible forks. The cap of -99 simply serves to ensure that the difficulty does not fall extremely far if two blocks happen to be very far apart in time due to a client security bug or other black-swan issue.
This is implemented in Python here: