Ethereum developers have agreed to postpone the activation of the “difficulty bomb” scheduled for this summer until December, when the merger of ETH1 and ETH2 is to take place.
At the end of last week, Ethereum developers agreed on how to delay the activation of the “difficulty bomb”, which, if left unchecked, will begin to slow down the network this summer. Difficulty Bomb is an old piece of code that makes Ethereum mining slower and less profitable over time, exponentially increasing the delay between the creation of each block.
The bomb was “planted” in 2015 to encourage developers to adopt Ethereum 2.0. It now takes an average of thirteen seconds to mine a block on Ethereum. If the difficulty bomb is activated, it will take more than twenty seconds to check the block.
At the end of last week, Ethereum developers agreed on how many blocks are needed to delay the activation of the bomb until December. The latency calculation was proposed by Ethereum developer James Hancock.
“The bomb remains here, but we are temporarily defusing it,” Hancock said. His calculation delays the bomb by 9,700,000 blocks.
Ethereum developer Tim Beiko said the developers had turned down a proposal to postpone the bomb until next spring. “It won’t be necessary,” he said.
The developers expect that the network will be updated by December and will allow Ethereum 1.0 on PoW to interoperate with Ethereum 2.0 on PoS, that is, the two versions of the network will merge. In May, the Steklo testnet was launched to demonstrate one method of merging two iterations of the network and exploring a new way to execute and complete transactions.
“If the merger is ready by December, we won’t have to do anything with the bomb because we will completely abandon mining,” Beiko said.
If the merger plans remain unfulfilled, the Ethereum Shanghai fork, which the developers plan to roll out in October, will again postpone the activation of the difficulty bomb. Previously, this happened already three times: in October 2017, in February 2019 and in January 2020.
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