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Informational EIP’s describe an Ethereum design issue, but do not propose a new feature. They do not require consensus and it is at the liberty of the user to decide whether or not to implement the change.
EIP Requirements:
- Preamble: A short descriptive title, author details, and the EIP number.
- Summary: A simple, brief description of the EIP.
- Abstract: A short description of the technical specifications of the EIP.
- Motivation: These are critical for EIP’s seeking to change the Ethereum protocol. It is a clear explanation of why the existing protocol is inadequate to solve the problem the current EIP seeks to solve.
- Specification: Describes the syntax of the new feature. It should be detailed enough to allow competing and interoperable implementations of the current Ethereum platforms.
- Rationale: Explains why particular design decisions were made. It should consider alternate designs and show compatibility in different languages. It must also show consensus within the community and discuss important concerns.
- Backwards Compatibility: All EIP’s with backwards incompatibility must describe these incompatibilities and their severity. The author must explain how they intend to deal with these incompatibilities.
- Test Cases: These are mandatory for EIP’s affecting consensus changes.
- Implementations: This must be completed before any EIP is given status ‘Final’, but does not need to be completed before the EIP is merged as a draft.
- Copyright waiver: All EIP’s must be in the public domain.
The EIP format design and implementation is as follows:
Work in Progress (WIP)
An EIP qualifies as a Work in Progress (WIP) when the author drafts a pull request.
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This EIP represents the current implementations.
Other statuses during design and implementation
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- Deferred: Core EIP’s that have been put off for a hard fork in the future.
- Rejected: An EIP that is fundamentally broken or a Core EIP which was rejected by the Core developers and will not be implemented.
- Active: Similar to final, but denotes an EIP which may be updated without changing its EIP number.
- Superseded: An EIP which was previously final but is no longer considered state-of-the-art. Another EIP will be in final and reference the Superseded one.
Current EIP Editors
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- Nick Johnson
- Casey Detrio
- Hudson Jameson
- Vitalik Buterin
- Nick Savers
- Martin Becze
- Greg Colvin
- Alex Beregszaszi
The DAO Fork & Ethereum Classic:
The Decentralized Autonomous Authority Organization (DAO) was a digital venture-capital fund instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain. It carried a decentralized, stateless business model for commercial and non-profit businesses. In May, 2016 DAO was crowdfunded via token sale, totaling over US$150 million from more than 11,000 investors. During this time a series of vulnerabilities, including recursive calls among others, were set forth by the Ethereum community, who urged that these issues needed to be addressed by the DAO team. In June, DAO was subject to an attack, using a combination of vulnerabilities, which managed to siphon 1/3 of the total token fund, totaling approximately US$50 million.
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