Ethereum hard fork-Byzantium; much anticipated upgrade for the Ethereum community. Supporters, experts, developers are awaiting the next, until now, Ethereums biggest upgrade; boldly, confidently, optimistically.

On Sunday-Monday it is expected to the world’s second largest blockchain, and number one, most used development platform, will have a very important change to its codebase, called Ethereum hard fork-Byzantium.

These much needed and expected changes in Ethereum software which will have several upgrades designed to make Ethereum lighter, faster, private; (for this it will be added a mechanism from underlying technology for privacy from Zcash)

“I expect that nothing will happen,” Ethereum Foundation developer and designer Alex Van de Sande told CoinDesk. “Nothing happened with previous hard forks, except for one.”

EXCEPT FOR ONE! That didn’t go as planned resulting in a problematic creation of a new asset, Ethereum Classic, suddenly becoming a competition to Ethereum, and worth mentioning during this process some people and companies lost money.

Ethereum community and especially experts do not foresee any big problems during this very important technological process, developers are very optimistic and enthusiastic for the smooth process and positive changes that will happen in the upgrade.

Stephen King, the principal and co-founder of ethereum-based real estate app RexMLS, parroted Van de Sande’s optimism, emphasizing the successful testing that has been completed.

“The fork is pretty uneventful. Everything went smooth on Ropsten, and it appears like all else is on track for a healthy transition,” he told CoinDesk.

One of the most anticipated upgrade is the possibility of private transactions in smart contracts, like an example Van de Sande expressed:

“It’s cool if you think about the new possibilities,” he said, painting a picture of a blockchain voting app with privacy built in, shielding who voted for which candidate”.

MINERS

There are some small issues in Ethereum improvement protocol (EIP) that have been feared.

Some miners are not too happy because EIP by reducing how much ether are issued in each block has also the potential to reduce mining profits!?

But according to Van de Sande, is that really most miners understand that while Byzantium will reduce each block reward from 5 ETH to 3 ETH, the change also boosts how often those blocks are created, giving miners more chance to earn the reward.

The Dificulty Bomb

Ethereum developers have built in a so-called “difficulty bomb” – a piece of code that gradually slows down the rate that ethereum blocks are issued on its blockchain in order to convince users to move over to a new chain. So, even if miners continue to mine the old version of ethereum, they’ll be economically disincentivized to keep doing so.

As we have written few weeks earlier this much anticipated upgrade of Ethereum software will make one step closer to realising the Vitalik Buterin vision and mission making “Ethereum World Wide Computer“.