The price of Ether breaks historic highs.

Rising to more than $ 1,000 for the first time last week, cryptocurrency recovered its place as the second blockchain in total value, a few days after being temporarily overtaken by Ripple's XRP token. However, as with this controversial market move, the massive surge in value is taking a deeper look from more novice or potential investors.

Indeed, rising prices of the ether masked a wave of technical problems – problems going so far as to bring out the cryptocurrency of a major exchange this weekend. Widely discussed on internal development channels, reports of problems to the public have been exceptionally quiet, barely touching Reddit, Twitter and other ethereum active forums.

But what is perhaps most remarkable is not the weak reaction, but the rather basic nature of the problems, since most relate directly to the most basic operations of blockchains.

To begin with, a problem in the software that determines how much a transaction should cost to send – called the "oracle gas" – has caused a massive inflation of user fees, with a much higher payment than necessary for a transaction to cross.

If it seems somewhat unpleasant to newcomers, other problems arise. In another case, the computers running the ethereum have trouble downloading the full history of their transactions.

More future-oriented projects also show signs of tension. Casper's test network, the ecological alternative to the long-awaited evidence of ethereum's work, and arguably a fundamental tenet of his value proposition, currently divides into inconsistent forks.

In a reminder for those eager to hit him big on crypto, the heavy weight of the Vlad Zamfir ethereum wrote in response to questions:

"(Ethereum is) still not sure or evolving."

As such, comments can be used as a cautionary note, which suggests the current state of the ethereum and more broadly suggests the nature of the ongoing work of cryptocurrencies.

Inflated transaction costs

Perhaps the most troubling question is that of the ethereum algorithm, which consists in estimating transaction costs: the main users of portfolios and exchanges can overpay until the end of the day. 70% of transactions.

Speaking at CoinDesk, ethereum developer Nick Johnson explained that this is due to a problem in the internal and automatic charging function of the ethereum gas.

While the code had supported the rise in transactions caused by the popular CryptoKitties application and the recent popularity of initial coin offerings, recently "something odd happened with the price estimated gas, "said Johnson at CoinDesk.

Johnson explained that the gas oracle – nowadays used by popular portfolios such as MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, Shapeshift and others – calculates transaction costs for users based on fees paid in the most recent ethereum transactions.

However, Johnson said in an email, "while it is still possible to make network transactions at a relatively low price, the oracle has begun to return more and more estimates high. "

According to Johnson, the main problem seems to be that some users were simply paying more to use the blockchain, thus increasing the calculation of gaseous oracles.

Griff Green, founder of the Giveth Decentralized Charitable Society, told CoinDesk that he had noticed unusually high costs and asked Twitter to ask users to manually calculate the correct transaction fees.

Green praised Bittrex for reporting the problem through his radiation from the Ethereum – and while other major stock exchanges and portfolios have not yet responded, Green said at CoinDesk that he expected the ethereum developers to release a new algorithm.

He told CoinDesk:

"It's just a shit of random technology that developers must manage to keep the network alive."

Blockchain synchronization problems

Adding to that, developers struggled to synchronize network nodes with the blockchain. Those who try fail, or face a long wait.

In retreating, any new node that wants to extract the ether or run the blockchain as part of its own wallet is facing this problem. And although the issue has been circulating for some time, it has worsened in recent weeks.

According to Peter Pratscher, who runs the Bitfly mining pool, there is a failure of a function called "warp sync" due to the current size of the ethereum – a figure that equals the current sum of all of the ethereum calculation, and is stored by all nodes.

Pratscher said that because of the failure of this function, "the new nodes will have to perform a traditional synchronization of the ethereum block chain, which requires some time (from the order of several days). "

Discussions are currently underway on how to reduce the size of the state ethereum, including the idea of ​​removing what is known as "dust counts" – empty addresses inactive for a long time.

Pratscher concluded:

"I hope that the development teams will overcome the problem and make some improvements in this regard."

Withdrawals testnet

Although it 's a less important problem, largely because it does not have any impact on the network. Live Etheres, the problems encountered by Casper's test network also testify to the early nature of the ethereum.

Perhaps because of the pressure felt for the need of the Ethereum scale, Casper's development efforts have increased in recent months, however, the nascent test net is currently being exploded, and the nodes can not connect to the blockchain

As a result, the test network, which was supposed to renew a source of "fun" in test environments, remained largely silent.

Addressing CoinDesk, Casper's prominent developer, Karl Floersch, claimed that it had nothing to do with Casper's code itself, which "works exactly as intended , without hiccups ".

However, given the new nature of the testnet, developers quickly suggested a series of possible problems and fixes that could again be causing a restart of the business.

Code on the screen image via Shutterstock

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