Vitalik Buterin advocates for network upgrade over fork terminology

Vitalik Buterin has advocated for the Ethereum community to consider adopting the term ‘network upgrade’ for next week’s upcoming hard fork on the Ethereum network.

In his latest tweet, he encourages people to use the “Zcash terminology of calling things like Constantinople ‘network upgrades’ and reserve ‘fork’ for splits that leave 2+ viable chains.”

The terminology difference he is trying to make here relates to hard forks that have been contentious in the past. The most famous of these on the Ethereum network was, of course, the hard fork relating to the creation of Ethereum Classic in July 2015.

This occurred after some members of the Ethereum community rejected the hard fork proposed by Vitalik and other members of the Ethereum foundation to undo the failure of the DAO (decentralised autonomous corporation) venture capital fund and its subsequent  ‘hack,’ which caused the loss of 3.6 million Ether (valued at $50 million at the time of the attack).

Back then, the reason for contention was on the grounds of “immutability.” This related to the principle that a blockchain cannot be changed, and they decided to refuse to update their node software to create the Ethereum Classic blockchain.

Ethereum Classic Vision

Today also sees the launch of the Ethereum Classic Vision blockchain. Any ETH holder will be able to claim three ETCV tokens when the new blockchain goes live. Ethereum Classic Vision is supposedly looking to combine all three features that a truly successful blockchain must have: decentralisation, scalability, and security.

The project also has the key developer team behind Ethereum Classic, after they abandoned their old project due to lack of funding.

Dumping non-Constantinople coins

Vitalik Buterin concluded his message by saying that “too many people have been asking me lately where they can dump their non-Constantinople coins.”

You can assume that people who ask questions like this have a complete lack of understanding about where the value of crypto assets comes from. From Vitalik’s point of view, I assume he wants to make sure that people understand that not all forks result in people receiving new tokens that they may be able to ‘dump’ on other people.