Just 38% of ethereum’s Geth nodes and only 42% of Parity’s nodes have upgraded with just four days to go until activation.

According to ethernodes, 1035 Geth nodes have upgraded, but nearly 1,700 have not. For Parity 338 have upgraded and close to 500 have not.

Ethereum nodes upgrade for Istanbul, Dec 2019

This is tracking only 3,500 ethereum nodes defined as “ready & synced clients seen on the Ethereum network in the last 24 hours.”

There’s around 7,000 reachable nodes, but only half of those are apparently live, and of those less than half have upgraded.

Presuming miners and businesses have upgraded, then the total percentage doesn’t necessarily matter as other nodes only validate for themselves, rather than for the public like businesses or for producing blocks like miners.

So at a technical level it doesn’t matter too much that less than half have upgraded as far as the network is concerned, but this is a hard fork. Meaning nodes that have not upgraded will not quite be able to run after December 7th.

The slow uptake is not too unusual, but it does suggest a general lack of interest in this fork which is basically a maintenance upgrade with no headline feature where ethereans in general are concerned.

Instead there’s some gas calculation efficiencies which could allow miners to increase the gas limit (blocksize), but their capacity constrain is more political rather than technical.

Miners in general have bought into this idea that a few transactions with high fees gives them more money than many transaction with low fees.

Such fees however are fairly low now, about $100,000 a day, but it reached $5 million a day in January 2018.

Despite a significant decrease in orphan rates (uncles), miners have nonetheless kept capacity fairly limited, with it looking like this situation will continue for at least another year or more, but at least ethereum gets to have one upgrade this year.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com