When most currencies were trying to reduce inflation, Ethereum developers agreed to delay the difficulty bomb, thereby increasing inflation.
The Difficulty Bomb, in addition to the retargeting algorithm, is responsible for Ethereum achieving continuous block times. The re-targeting algorithm ensures that if the block time is greater than 20 seconds, the difficulty level will decrease. And if the block time is less than 10 seconds, the difficulty level will increase.
Ethereum Devs delay Difficulty bomb again
A core issue that can lead to eliminating difficulty bombs is because Ice Age is complex and makes predicting blocking time very difficult. Hancock explained in a discussion about Core Devs on Gitter:
And there’s no way to predict the effect of block times without simulating hash functions and difficult changes that occur as soon as the block is searched.
The recent debate regarding the Ethereum Difficulty bomb has finally ended. According to the developers, the Difficulty bomb will have another delay.
The rough consensus was achieved to delay the Difficulty bomb for years among Ethereum developers during a public call.
The call itself had some technical issues, so it’s unclear exactly what was said, but PegaSys’s Tim Beiko said:
“The current proposal is block 9.2M, which will take us to – January 6.
There was no objection during the call, so it seemed we had a rough consensus to upgrade on the 9.2M block, repel the hard 9M bomb and use the name Mountain Glacier”.
Details related to what is said are a bit more difficult, as the public call between developers has encountered a number of technical issues. However, PegaSys in Tim Beiko confirmed that nine million blocks are the current figure. The developers agreed to delay the Difficulty bomb for 4 million blocks.
According to estimates, the Difficulty bomb problem will continue to appear in about 700 days, which is in nearly two years. In other words, the bomb will explode again in 2021/2022. On the other hand, PoS Beacon Chain will appear significantly earlier, likely in the spring of 2020.
Meanwhile, at the time of the fork, inflation will increase by 2,000 ETH per day. Currently, the number of ETH per day is about 11,600, which means it will bounce back to 13,600, equivalent to the number miners saw before the bomb exploded.
PoS and PoW hybrid will come before PoS itself
One thing to note is that the developers made all the decisions themselves without the participation of the Ethereum community. One of the decisions included the proposed fork name, Melting Glacier. However, it was finally renamed Mountain Glacier.
The new name still holds the same message “melting the ice age”, which is what the Difficulty bomb is also called. In other words, increasing the difficulty of mining will consume more energy, making it less profitable and harmful to the environment.
Another @ethereum #AllCoreDevs starting in ~15 minutes.
Agenda: https://t.co/DPH9QSvB2C
Livestream: https://t.co/fGnXpnRZ8VThis should be an interesting one because we’ll be discussing the difficulty bomb/Ice Age ❄️? https://t.co/PeoxWvonwa
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) November 29, 2019
However, while Ethereum itself will become much more environmentally friendly, once the PoS algorithm starts. It will eliminate the need for miners. Unfortunately, Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, believes that PoS is still very far away and may take years to reach it.
Instead, developers will introduce a combination of PoS and PoW, although the two will not come into direct contact with each other. The problem is undoubtedly very complicated, and solving it is not a simple one. Moreover, the delay of Difficulty bomb is likely to win also has a good impact on efforts to resolve it.
What happens now?
Currently, right after the new Istanbul update, the developers have agreed to hold an emergency hard fork and the fork will take place after only a few days, on December 7, on the 9,069,000 blocks. This is supposed to be the last hard fork that Ethereum 1.0 will go through, as it will pave the way for Serenity, and finally, Ethereum 2.0.
However, before moving to Ethereum 2.0, the network will see some changes. This will include enabling Casper, alleged conversion to PoS, updating to the Ethereum virtual machine, as well as changing the communication logic and protocol economics. On top of that, in June 2020, the Ethereum network, expected to have another update called Berlin, will be the next step for Ethereum 2.0.
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