The frontier is coming. What to expect and how to prepare?

The launch of ‘Frontier’, the first milestone in the launch of the Ethereum project, is just a few days away. Frontier will follow ‘Homestead’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Serenity’ throughout the next year, adding new features and improving the user-friendliness and security of the platform.

What is Frontier?

Frontier is the actual implementation of the Ethereum project, but it is the default implementation. It is intended for technical users, especially developers. During Frontier’s launch, we expect early adopters and application developers to begin building communities and forming a live ecosystem. Like other settlers during the American frontier, these settlers would be presented with great opportunities, but they would also face many dangers. If you don’t like building from source and command line interfaces, you may want to wait for a more user-friendly Ethereum software release before getting started.

When does Frontier go live?

Frontier is now feature complete and the codebase has been frozen for two weeks. Our team is currently reviewing the final stages of the release, and not all of them will be technical. There will be no countdown. Ethereum is not ‘launched’ centrally, but rather is created through consensus. Users must voluntarily download and run a specific version of the software and then create and load Genesis blocks to participate in the official project network. More details on this process will be released soon.

What can you expect from Frontier?

Initial ‘thaw’: gas restrictions in the first few days

Frontier’s first software release had a hardcoded gas limit of 5,000 per block. Unlike the normal per-block gas parameters, this special limit does not increase proportionally with network usage, effectively preventing transactions for the first few days. This ‘thaw’ period allows miners to start working and early adopters to install their clients without having to ‘rush’. In the next few days (approximately 3-4 days, subject to change) we will be releasing a small software update that all clients will need to install. This update increases the gas limit per block to 3 million, with the initial number scaled up or down based on the default miner settings.

Bugs, Issues, and Complications

We are very excited about how the ‘Olympic’ testing phase of the Ethereum testnet has turned out. That said, work on Frontier software isn’t over yet. Expect weekly updates to give you access to a better and more stable client. Many of the planned Frontier issues (including Homestead’s chain reset, limiting mining rewards to 10%, and centralized checkpoints) were deemed unnecessary. However, there are still major differences between Frontier and Homestead. Frontier will have issues, updates, and bugs. Users miss out on opportunities when using the software. Developers will display a BIG warning message before installing. Frontier has limited documentation and the tools provided require advanced skills.

canary contract

A canary contract is a simple switch with values ​​like 0 or 1. Each contract is controlled by a different member of the Eth/Dev team and is updated with ‘1’ when the internal Frontier Disaster Recovery team flags a consensus issue. Something like a fork.

Within each Frontier client, four contracts are inspected per block. If the value of 2 out of 4 of these contracts transitions from 0 to 1, mining will stop and the user will be prompted to update their client. This is to prevent “fire and forget” miners from interfering with chain upgrades.

This process is centralized and runs only during the Frontier period. This helps avoid the risk of prolonged downtime (more than 24 hours).

Statistics, status and Badblock website

You are probably already familiar with our Network Statistics Monitor. https://stats.ethdev.com/. Provides a quick overview of network status, block resolution times, and gas statistics. If you would like to learn more, I created brief video Describes various KPIs. Please remember that participation on the statistics page is voluntary and nodes must: add yourself Before appearing on the panel.

In addition to the statistics page, there is a status page located here: https://status.ethdev.com/ (No link because the site is not yet active) Provides a brief overview of any issues that may affect Frontier. Use this as your first port of call if you think something is wrong.

Finally, if any of our clients receive an invalid block, they refuse to process it and send it to the bad block website (aka ‘Sentinel’). This could mean more serious problems like bugs or forks. Either way, this process alerts developers to potential problems in the network. The website itself is public and available at: https://badblocks.ethdev.com (Currently operating on testnet)

clean testnet

Over the past few months, the Ethereum test network has been pushed to its limits to test scalability and block propagation times. As part of this testing, we encouraged users to spam the network with transactions, contract creation code, and contract calls, sometimes reaching over 25 transactions per second. This caused the test network chain to grow to a rather unwieldy size, making it difficult for new users to keep up. For this reason, soon after Frontier launches there will be a new test network that follows the same rules as Frontier.

Olympic Reward Distribution

During the Olympic stage, various rewards were offered for various achievements, including mining abilities. Many people participated and received rewards. We would especially like to thank PhiStr90, Dino, and Samuel Lavery for their help during stress testing. The rewards will not be part of the Frontier Genesis block, but will instead be delivered by Foundation bots in the weeks following launch.

How do I get started with Frontier?

tools

Frontier and all its dependencies are available as a single-line installer from our website. https://www.ethereum.org/. Single-line installers are provided for OSX, Linux, and Windows. Of course, advanced users can still install everything. from sourceOr use our binary build Automated Build Bot.

Once Frontier is installed on a computer, users must create Genesis blocks themselves and then load them into the Frontier client. Scripts and instructions on how to do this will be available as part of the new Ethereum website and various wikis.

We often get questions about how existing users will transition from a test network to a live network. This is done via a toggle in the geth console (–networkId). By default, new builds aim to connect to the live network, and to switch back to the test network, simply specify the network ID as ‘0’.

document

The best place to get started with Ethereum is the official website. gitbook. You can learn more about the official content after referring to the gitbook. Solidity Tutorial. If you would like more detailed information, main wiki, Go to client wiki and C++ client wiki. Lastly, if you want to know more about mining, Mining FAQs and Guides Updated regularly on the forum.

be helped

Ethereum is an open source software project, so all help is provided through community channels. If a problem arises, we are your first port of call. forumNext is our Ethereum Chat channel. On the other hand, if you are experiencing issues with your Ether Sale wallet, such as not being able to load your pre-sale purchases. Helpdesk address It will continue to operate throughout the Frontier (and possibly beyond).

Of course, you can also get local help. 115 meetings Worldwide – If your city is not listed, we recommend that you: make one.