DELAYED - Fork in the road to Constantinople, Capital city of Ethereum, where PoS now rules

Pic: https://www.crypto-economy.net/en/ethereum-eth-constantinople-hard-fork-pushed-to-2019/
It appears that the long awaited Constantinople fork of the Ethereum blockchain has been delayed at the 11th hour. This is probably for the best, temporarily, since it was just discovered that the fork may not only solve some issues but also create further issues.

Initially the Costantinople fork is designed to facilitate the following changes:
• Will allow enabling state channels
• Lower the amount of computing power to enable smart contracts
• Lower the amount of gas to send transactions
• EIP1234 creates a block reward adjustment for Eth miners – “the Thirdening”

Miners will be rewarded with 2 ETH instead of 3 ETH when they solve a block so the new supply of Ether will go down, lowering the inflation rate of Ether.

Now as regular ETH holders we won’t need to do anything at all. Just keep your ETH wherever it is – exchange, wallet, trezor, MEW, etc and carry on as normal. It’s only the miners, exchanges and node operators that would need to make the necessary adjustments for the Constsntinople fork. And they will need to do it before January 17, 4:00am GMT. That was to be the scheduled time of Constantinople.

However…

“The Ethereum Core Developers and the Ethereum Security Community were made aware of the potential Constantinople-related issues identified by ChainSecurity on January 15, 2019. We are investigating any potential vulnerabilities… Out of an abundance of caution, key stakeholders around the Ethereum community have determined that the best course of action will be to delay the planned Constantinople fork that would have occurred at block 7,080,000 on January 16, 2019.”

https://blog.ethereum.org/2019/01/15/security-alert-ethereum-constantinople-postponement/

It seems that the Constsntinople fork would have allowed an unwanted side effect which enables re-entrancy attacks. So far there are no vulnerable smart contracts so it looks like Joseph Lubin, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum and ChainSecurity have successfully prevented an imminent vulnerability, much to their credit.

If you want to know more about the actual inner details, then you can find them at https://medium.com/chainsecurity/constantinople-enables-new-reentrancy-attack-ace4088297d9

What do you think of the state of Ethereum at the moment? Apparently Ethereum GPU miners are operating on very thin margins at the current price of ETH around $150 or less. Of course, block reward reductions are probably necessary, like the bitcoin “halving” that occurs every few years on schedule. They are beneficial to the economy of crypto in the long run, but it apparently couldn’t happen at a worse time for miners now.

“Ethereum’s hashrate could fall drastically after the upgrade, which would hurt ETH’s value proposition in turn. Constantinople may also drastically increase ASIC-induced centralization.”

Han Yoon, chief executive at crypto startup Lunar Digital Assets

https://ethereumworldnews.com/ethereum-constantinople-potentially-delayed/

Let us know what you think in the comments below, or if you have any further updates.