Ethereum Difficulty: Ethereum Difficulty Bomb Delayed Again Amid Growing Concern About Merge Delay Until June
The Ethereum difficulty bomb will usher in a new age for cryptocurrency, but when will it go off?
In the latter half of 2021, Ethereum, like other cryptocurrencies like Cardano and even Bitcoin, will experience multiple important changes. The difficulty of bomb detonation was already mentioned, and it will very certainly happen today.
Here's when the Ethereum difficulty bomb will occur.
Date of the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
The Ethereum difficulty bomb is set to go live in June 2022, a year later than the original deadline of December 2021.
EIP-3238 was supposed to be included in the initial London Hard Fork update. The difficulty bomb would be postponed until Q2 2022 as a result of this.
Ethereum, on the other hand, chose to adopt EIP-3554 in May 2021, according to developer Tim Beiko. The difficulty bomb was moved back to December in order to coincide with the deployment of Ethereum staking.
Since then, Beiko and James Hancock have produced EIP-4345, an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that will postpone the difficulty bomb until June 2022.
This would enable the difficulty bomb to happen after the merging, which is an important step in the Ethereum 2.0 launch.
Beiko elaborated on this on GitHub, saying:
Despite the fact that merging testing is going well, it won't happen until the difficulty bomb goes off again (early December, as per EIP-3554). We are still more than a month away from having client releases ready for the merging, thus the bomb must be pushed back.
Despite the June release date, the difficulty increase will take many months to have a meaningful influence on block times.
The difficulty bomb might be put out even more if required, according to the EIP-4345 plan, therefore this date is not definite.
Meaning of the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
Ethereum mining will become more difficult as a result of the Ethereum difficulty bomb, making this proof-of-work endeavor less viable for cryptocurrency miners.
Gradually, the difficulty increase will raise the block time of ETH to the point where mining will no longer be profitable for miners.
The current block time for ETH is between 12 and 14 seconds. According to Tim Beiko, five months after the difficulty explosion, Ethereum's block time might increase by 487% or 64 seconds.
The Ethereum 'Ice Age' will come as a result of this. As more miners leave the now-unprofitable network, the Ethereum blockchain would stall and grind to a standstill.
Why Release the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb?
On the surface, an Ethereum network freeze does not appear to be something the network would want to do.
It does, however, have advantages.
The switch to staking in Ethereum 2.0 has been criticized by miners, who will see their income halved. This difficulty bomb should discourage miners from continuing their work once Eth2 is introduced.
Apart from this, Ethereum supplier Nethermind claims that the difficulty bomb will serve as a "guard against attackers who split Ethereum."
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