Confirmed Constantinople Delayed Until 2019
We all have been waiting for it and seriously wanting it for a long time now. I thought we would see it in 2018 and then by the end of 2018 however beta testing on the testnet showed some major flaws and has now delayed the release of the hard fork till 2019 for the Ethereum network.
What will be in Constantinople ?
A total of 5 changes will take place too improve the system they are
EIP 145 - Bitwise shifting which will allow for more efficient method of information processing.
EIP 1052 - Improved optimizing of large scale code execution on Ethereum
EIP 1283 - This one is geared to help Dapps or developers building on top of the Ethereum blockchain to allow for equitable pricing.
EIP 1014 - Vitalik Buterin created this one is the biggie this one allows for state channels and "off-chain" transactions. Most likely the start to paving the way to sharding.
EIP 1234 - Perhaps one of the biggest changes it reduces the block reward from 3ETH down to 2ETH and delays the difficulty bomb for a period of 12 months.
While some of these don't sound like big improvements they are in fact helping pave the way for faster changes and scalability on the chain.
I heard that EIP 1234 was critical to maintain the mining incentives working well as if the difficulty bomb goes off, it could lead to the departure of many mining pools. I wonder what will happen now with this delay if the the block that executes the bomb comes sooner than the fork.
I read a nice simple and less technical review of ethereum constantinople upgrade here: https://blog.kucoin.com/constantinople-an-ethereum-hard-fork-sk-st. This is a very noob friendly article as i understand the thing so easily just by reading it