Ethereum to Hold Up the Difficulty Bomb

The Difficulty Bomb code is supposed to be included in the upcoming Constantinople hard fork that was designed to serve as a bridge for the Proof of Work (POW) algorithm.

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation agreed on changing the consensus algorithm to Proof of Stake (POS) which is more energy-efficient. In order to apply it, developers created the so-called Difficulty Bomb that generates unfavorable and complicated blocks.

During the meeting on August 31, the team took into consideration the impact of block rewards from the new improvement. There were three suggested items. EIP-858 would diminish block rewards to 1 ETH. EIP-1234 would decrease them to 2 ETH and EP-1295 would maintain the rewards to 3 ETH but would influence the Proof of Work incentive structure.

The developers decided that the EIP-1234 scenario was the most favorable out of the three. The Difficulty Bomb will be postponed for another 12 months. With the pause, the blockchain will be ready in winter 2019, and the block rewards will be reduced with the Constantinople fork.  

The upcoming fork created a lot of discussions among the Ethereum community. Some think that a fork is inevitable and agree with the EIP-1234 scenario, others are not happy about the result, as 72% of users on Github voted for the EIP-858.

The main concerns are a possible centralization risk with EIP-1295 and a network impact with EIP-858 and EIP-1234. Many wanted to include EIP-960 into the plan as it would be easier to be integrated into the Constantinople hard fork.

Currently, Ethereum is being sold at around $283 and is down by 0.48 percent and up by 1.39 in the past week. The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) is planning to launch ETH at the end of 2018.