Hard Fork Completed
As announced earlier, Beam has successfully completed the second Hard Fork.
At block height 777,777 the mining algorithm was changed from BeamHashII to BeamHashIII
Team Beam were all online at the time of the fork, constantly monitoring the health of the network and prepared for any contingency.
While the Fork was VERY smooth it was a moment of suspense when block 777,776 was mined and we were all waiting to see the post-fork block 777,777 appear. When it happened, it was a moment of joy and pride for the team.
Before
After
Congrats to 2miners who found block 777,776, the last BH2 block and to Leafpool for having mined the first block with the new PoW.
The first BeamHashIII block on our freely available open source pool software also happened at block 777,801 — build your own pool with this free code.
Aftermath
After the Hard Fork occurred, we witnessed an expected drop in difficulty and the two main reasons being that; not all the miners had performed a timely upgrade, and that the upgraded miners participating in the new PoW were mining at lower speeds per GPU on the network — as is the design of BeamHashIII.
However, only 24 hours after the fork, the hash rate of the network reached and eventually stabilised from its pre-fork value (taking into consideration that the the previous algorithm was more established with miner development and offered higher GPU mining hashrates).
Why did we do the Fork
When Beam launched on Jan 3, 2019, we announced that we will perform two hard forks. The rationale was to signal to ASIC developers that there is no point to start developing ASICs until the second hard fork is out.
We timed the first fork roughly 6 months from launch, and the second one in mid 2020. The 10-month timeframe is chosen because that’s how long it usually takes to develop a new ASIC chip.
What else is in this Hard Fork
In addition to the algorithm change, we implemented several important features that are consensus-breaking and can only be done as part of a Hard Fork:
- Activate support for Confidential Assets
- Activate support for Lelantus Mimblewimble
- Activate support for One Sided Payments
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our wonderful community, the miners, the pools and the exchanges who worked diligently to perform the necessary software upgrades and help us pass the Hard Fork with flying colors.
We also want to extend special thanks to our PoW Advisor Wilke Trei (aka Lolliedieb) who developed BeamHashI, BeamHashII and BeamHashIII.
Go Beam!
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