HF1807: A Hard Fork on July 9th, 2018

Update 2018-07-11 9:51am EST: The fork is live. Block 400155 occurred on July 9 at 11:40am EST. Block 401019 (the block with the first difference between forks) occurred on July 11 at 2:43am EST. The prefork chain halted at that block, while the postfork chain is proceeding normally (at block 401361 at the time of writing).

Update 2018-07-11 2:35pm EST: Some users have reported that blocks are coming in slowly or not at all. If you were running an old version (< version 0.12.2.0) until block 401019 or after, and then updated, you will be stuck on the old chain. To check if you are stuck on the old chain, run the command, getblockhash 401019 to check the blockhash on block 401019. If the output is not equal to 40c852eea4184aa5597eb075328921a3e600eb9f930561cc0c463a63276c609b you are on the wrong chain. To fix this, you will need to reindex. Run lbrycrdd with the reindex option: ./lbrycrdd -reindex . You may also need to clear your ban list with command clearbanned to unban any post fork nodes.

What's Changing

LBRY is announcing hard fork HF1807. This fork will extend how long claims are valid before they expire.

Currently, claims expire after about 1.5 years unless they are updated. After the fork takes effect, claims will expire after 10 years.

Existing claims that have not expired will have their expiration extended to 10 years.

Any claims that expire before the fork takes effect will stay expired. We will republish them manually to preserve access to that content.

Only claim expiration is changing. The block rewards, token distribution, hash algorithms, etc. are all staying the same.

The fork will take effect at block 400155, which will occur on July 9th, 2018 at around noon EST.

What You Should Do

For most people, nothing needs to be done. The fork will take effect transparently and won't change your experience of LBRY.

If you are running a full node or mining pool, upgrade to the latest version of lbrycrd as soon as possible.

Pre-built binaries are available on the releases page. You will need version 0.12.2.0 or higher.

We will post updates about this fork to this page. If you want to be notified of news about this fork and future forks, please join the fork mailing list.

Fork Details

The fork is explained in detail in this pull request, including the relevant code.

Please review the details and the code if you are able to.

We pay significant bounties for any bugs found in blockchain code, especially fork-related code. Email grin@lbry.com if you wish to discuss.