Many people often think that Ethereum has expired. Even as AZCoin News mentioned, nearly half of the Ethereum nodes have been shut down since the Istanbul Ethereum hard fork. And it seems that the Istanbul fork is not popular with everyone despite its success. However, these are only minority opinions. Most of the Ethereum community on Reddit supports reducing block rewards and issuing ETH with the next hard fork.
Ethereum is about to release a new hard fork?
Less than a month after the Istanbul hard fork took place, Ethereum has made several improvements in interoperability, security, and reduced costs for the network. However, the update process does not stop there. It is expected that on the first day of 2020, another hard fork on the Ethereum network will appear at block 9200000. This hard fork is called Muir Glacier, related to the Ethereum difficulty bomb or the Ice Age has been encoded into Proof of work algorithm to maintain average blocking time by adjusting the difficulty level.
Source: Etherscan
This mechanism will increase every 100,000 blocks and so on until a ‘freezeout’ appears – a sign that the Ice Age has arrived. Ice age will reduce overall network performance due to increased blocking time. These are the updates needed to delay the difficulty bomb, especially when Ethereum is growing in terms of dApps and smart contracts. Through EIP 2384, the Muir Glacier upgrade will delay the difficulty bomb for another 4 million blocks, or about 600 days.
Node operators and miners will need to update their client software, but the hard fork will not affect Ethereum owners or traders.
Reducing block rewards are still supported
Currently, the Ethereum network is again running the same proof of work algorithm as Bitcoin. Therefore, when Bitcoin went through many halving times, the Ethereum network went through the same. Accordingly, the last time was in early 2019 with the Constantinople hard fork. Block rewards have been reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, in what was termed a ‘thirdening’.
At present, no other halving event occurs until Phase 2, which cannot happen before 2021.
According to a recent vote, nearly 70% of the Ethereum community using Reddit responded in favor of reducing the block reward to 1 ETH. Voting is conducted using an experimental Reddit feature called ‘donuts.’ This feature will tokenize karma points on the platform. The Ethtrader sub is the guinea-pig for the system whereby users earn ‘donuts ‘instead of‘ karma’ and can use them to vote.
There were about 7.6 million donuts used in this vote, nearly 20% of the tokenized karma supply on Reddit.
The vote was conducted with the Muir Glacier upgrade approaching because a reduction in a release also accompanied previous installments. However, it may not represent the broader Ethereum community and seem to be just a snapshot of this social media channel.
Most of this will come when the second-largest cryptocurrency network completely turns into proof of where the shares are issued, and inflation will drop significantly. But that might still be a few more years for the ETH 1.0 soldiers to continue.
Read more:
- McAfee: There Are Only 374 Days Left After The Bet That Bitcoin Reaches Over $ 1 Million By 2020, And Will A Dream Come True?
- China’s CBDC Will Not Be As Speculative As Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrencies