Ethereum’s difficulty bomb, if it explodes, could significantly increase the difficulty of mining. It is expected to explode in the winter.
However, the developers of the network have calculated what is needed to defuse the bomb on Friday (14).
With the discovery, the developers will again postpone the explosion.
Old bomb
“Hard Bomb” was the name of an old piece of code on the Ethereum network. As the name suggests, this dramatically discourages exponential mining of ETH, increasing the time it takes to mine each block.
As a result, Ethereum mining is slower and less profitable in the post-explosion period.
Interestingly, the bomb was deliberately planted in 2015. The goal was to get developers to implement Ethereum 2.0.
In this scenario, the developers calculated how long it would take (in blocks) to postpone the bomb until December. The pump is delayed as follows: the blocks are “rewound” for the pump code only, causing the timer to reset.
To date, the installation of the bomb has been postponed three times: in October 2017, February 2019 and January 2020.
James Hancock, Ethereum developer, proposed deferral through EIP-3554. This is a proposal to improve Ethereum sent to the cryptocurrency community for a vote.
The original intention was to postpone the bomb until fall 2022. However, as Tim Beiko told Decrypt, this is not necessary.
Beiko believes that Ethereum 1.0 will be able to interact with Ethereum 2.0 in December. Update 2.0 changes the mining algorithm of the network, moving from proof of work (PoW) to proof of participation (PoS).
Thus, if the merge of versions really happens in December, there will be no need to postpone the pumping of difficulty again – since there will be no more mining.
A hard fork in Shanghai, scheduled for October this year, could kickstart the end of ETH mining.
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