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Ethereum Gets it's Difficulty Time Bomb!

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Agr8buzz
@agr8buzz
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While the London Hard Fork has recently been completed there's still more nails to be put in the ETH mining coffin ahead of PoS.


While the proof of stake workflow continues to be tested on the Beacon chain there's still a long road ahead to winding down the present proof of work system.

Part of that long winding road is weening proof of work miners off the Ethereum tit. The London hard fork helps with this but EIP 3554 will mean that the impending difficulty bomb will come a little sooner than originally planned.

What is the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

Ethereum's difficulty bomb is the increasing level of difficulty in the proof-of-work mining algorithm.

Ethereum's difficulty bomb refers to the increasing difficulty level or complexity of “puzzles” in the proof-of-work mining algorithm. As the calculations become harder, it results in longer than normal block times and lower rewards for miners. -yahoo.com

What EIP 3554 does is move the difficulty bomb to December 2021, at which point the blockchain would be essentially unminable.

This forces developers to make progress with the new proof of stake system before the blockchain becomes unusable, and at the same time reduces the incentive for miners to join or continue to mine using proof of work.

London Hard Fork is Live

Ethereum's London hard fork went live on Aug 4th, apparently without issue!

A key portion of the hard fork changes the fee schedule and adds a mechanic that will burn a % of the fees collected, instead of distributing it as mining rewards.

While the move reduces mining rewards in a shift towards the future proof of stake system, I don't see these changes reducing the gas fees required to transact on the network.

I believe the deflationary mechanic is awesome for the fundamentals of Ethereum, but I'm not sure it's part of a scaling solution.

Ethereum has been doing great as of late with frequent updates, a successful fork, and the price up by as much as 50% over the past 2 weeks!

All eyes are on the chain as it inches slowly down the long winding road on it's way to ETH 2.0.

Ciao for now,

@agr8buzz

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