Summary:
-The Ethereum difficulty bomb was originally scheduled to be launched this summer.
– Ethernet Square core developers Tim Beiko and James Hancock said the team would defer difficult bomb to 12 months.
– This may be the last time developers need to take such action.
Ethereum developers agreed on Friday to postpone a “difficulty bomb”, which, if not dealt with, will start to slow down the Ethereum network this summer.
The Ethereum “Difficulty Bomb” is a piece of code embedded by Ethereum developers in 2015 to artificially slow down the speed of Ethereum issuance by gradually increasing the difficulty of blockchain mining. This mechanism is designed to make a huge shift from Ethereum to a proof-of-stake ( PoS ) mechanism algorithm.
Under the current proof-of-work consensus mechanism, miners will win rewards every time they create a new block and add it to the blockchain. But when the Ethereum difficulty bomb is set to “detonate”, the difficulty for miners to obtain rewards through mining will increase exponentially.
Ethereum 2.0 will switch the network from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
It now takes an average of 13 seconds to mine a block in Ethereum . If the difficulty bomb is not delayed, it will take more than 20 seconds to verify a block by the end of the year .
On Friday, Ethereum developers agreed on how many blocks would be needed to delay the difficulty bomb by December .
On May 14 , the core developers of Ethereum held a conference call. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko updated the results of the conference and said that most of the conference time was focused on solving the final details of the London upgrade. The London upgrade will include EIP-3541 and EIP-3554 . Among them, EIP-3541 prevents the deployment of contracts beginning with ” 0xEF ” to lay the foundation for large-scale EVM overhaul ( EIP-3540 ); EIP-3554 proposes to delay the difficulty bomb to December .
In addition, the meeting discussed the test of time to upgrade network for London, Ropsten scheduled to be highly Block 10399301 ( 6 Yue 9 Ri), Goerli scheduled to be highly block 4979794 ( 6 Yue 16 Ri), Rinkeby is scheduled to block highly 8,813,188 ( 6 May 23 May), the main network is still scheduled for 7 May 14 Ri upgrade, after the first successful test network bifurcation, and then determine the main network client upgrade block.
About the difficulty of computing the bomb was delayed by the Square Ethernet core developers James Hancock raised . “The difficulty bomb has always been there. We just dialed its blocktime back a bit to temporarily’dismantle’ the bomb,” Hancock told Decrypt . He proposed to postpone the bomb by 970,000 blocks.
The blocktime chart on Etherscan . James Hancock provided this comment to Decrypt .
Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko told Decrypt that the developer rejected the proposal to postpone the difficulty bomb until next spring. He said it was unnecessary.
Ethereum developers expect that by December , the network will be updated to allow Ethereum 1.0 ( a network that relies on PoW ) to communicate with Ethereum 2.0 ( a new network that relies on PoS ). This is the so-called merge ( Merge ).
“If the merger is completed before December , we don’t need to take any action on the difficulty bomb because we will completely abandon mining.” Beiko added.
If the merger plan is still not implemented, the Shanghai fork of Ethereum is expected to take place in October , which will once again postpone the launch of the difficulty bomb.