Ethereum Developers Propose Delaying Difficulty Bomb or Removing it Altogether

A new proposal to delay the difficulty bomb has been introduced by developers Tim Beiko and James Hancock.

This week, the developers released Ethereum Investment Proposal (EIP) 4345 aims to delay the difficult bomb to May 2022 or remove it altogether.

Ethereum’s difficulty bomb refers to increasing the difficulty level of complex computations in the mining algorithm to receive Ether rewards. This difficulty bomb is to deter miners from continuing with Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism after the Ethereum network transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

The new proposal wants the difficulty bomb to be adjusted 10,500,000 blocks later than the actual block number.

“Targeting for the Shanghai upgrade and/or the Merge to occur before May 2022. Either the bomb can be readjusted at that time, or removed all together,” reads the proposal.

Beiko, Ethereum Foundation developer, wrote on Ethereum Forum that though the merge testing is going well, it can’t happen until the difficulty bomb is due to be off again in early December.

“We are not ~1 month away from having client releases ready for the merge, so we need to push the bomb back again.”

Big picture: This week, Ethereum researchers and developers met to work toward the merge. They were able to implement “merge clients” and use a testnet to simulate the transfer from PoW to PoS. This testnet will be accessible by the community and is a giant leap toward the merge.

— superphiz.eth (@superphiz) October 8, 2021

Ethereum researchers and core developers actually met in person to work on the transition to the PoS network. This upgrade, known as “The Merge,” is meant to reduce the energy consumption of the second-largest network by 99.8%.

The team is currently preparing for the Altair upgrade on the beacon chain mainnet set for epoch 74240 on Oct 27, 2021, at 10:56:23 am UTC. Those who stake on ETH 2.0 are required to upgrade their client before the scheduled update.

In other news, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin blasted “Bitcoin maximalists” this week for forcing Bitcoin’s usage in El Salvador.

“Making it mandatory for businesses to accept a specific cryptocurrency is contrary to the ideals of freedom that are supposed to be so important to the crypto space,” wrote Buterin in a Reddit thread.

Earlier last month, El Salvador became the world’s first nation to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender alongside the USD. President Nayib Buekle claims that in less than a month of the launch of the government’s Bitcoin wallet Chivo, it garnered 3 million active users, representing 46% of El Salvador’s population.

“This tactic of pushing BTC to millions of people in El Salvador at the same time with almost no attempt at prior education is reckless, and risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed. Shame on everyone (ok, fine, I’ll call out the main people responsible: shame on Bitcoin maximalists) who are uncritically praising him.”

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