Ethereum Hard Fork Happening Now - User Advice

The first half of the Ethereum Metropolis hard fork, nicknamed Byzantium, is happening on Monday at some point between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC. The fork is scheduled to take place at block number 4,370,000. For those interested in watching the fork take place live, a countdown clock can be found here.

Updates galore
The much anticipated hard fork contains a number of updates to the Ethereum chain including an addition of ‘REVERT’ opcode, which permits error handling without consuming all gas, support for big integer modular exponentiation, support for variable length return values, and changes to the difficulty adjustment formula to take uncles into account.

However, perhaps the most discussed upgrades include the successful addition of fully anonymous zero knowledge proofs (ZK-Snarks), and the delay of the difficulty bomb (nicknamed ice age) by a full year, as well as a reduction of block creation reward from five to three ether. Some have argued that the anonymity of the ZK Snark upgrade will create newfound adoption on Wall Street.

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https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-hard-fork-happening-now-user-advice