Ethereum London upgrade will delay difficulty bomb until December

Ethereum developers agreed on Friday to delay a "difficulty bomb" that will start slowing the ethereum network this summer if left unaddressed.

The ethereum "difficulty bomb" is a piece of code embedded by ethereum developers in 2015 that artificially slows ethereum issuance by gradually increasing the difficulty of blockchain mining. This mechanism is designed to enable Ethereum's massive shift to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism algorithm.

Under the current conditions of the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, miners earn rewards every time they create a new block and add it to the blockchain. But when the Ethereum difficulty bomb is set to "explode," it will be exponentially more difficult for miners to earn rewards through mining.

Exclusive｜The current Ethereum recommended Gas fee is 51.33Gwei, a month-on-month decrease of 18.37%: Golden Finance News, according to OKLink chain data, the number of active-zce addresses on the Ethereum 24h chain exceeds 442,100, a month-on-month decrease of 1.66%; The transaction volume on the chain was nearly 3.1669 million ETH, a month-on-month decrease of 0.32%; the number of on-chain transactions exceeded 1.0127 million, a month-on-month decrease of 0.89%.

As of 2:00 p.m., the computing power of the entire Ethereum network is about 243.34TH/s, a decrease of 0.5TH/s from the previous month. The recommended Gas fee is 51.33Gwei, a decrease of 18.37% from the previous month. The number of unconfirmed transactions is about 90,400. [2020/10/9]

Ethereum 2.0 will switch the network from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).

There are 115,323 unconfirmed transactions on Ethereum: Golden Finance News, according to OKLink data, there are 115,323 unconfirmed transactions on Ethereum, the current network computing power is 238.63TH/s, the network difficulty is 3.16P, and the current currency holding address is 47,963,441 , a year-on-year increase of 123,901, the 24h on-chain transaction volume is 4,014,724.25ETH, and the current average block generation time is 13s. [2020/9/23]

It now takes an average of 13 seconds to mine a block on Ethereum. If the difficulty bomb is not delayed, it will take more than 20 seconds to verify a block by the end of the year.

On Friday, ethereum developers agreed on how many blocks it would take to delay the difficulty bomb until December.

News | Ethereum Parity node has fixed its vulnerability and urges all Ethereum nodes to update: Parity said on Twitter that the vulnerability repair has been completed, please update the node as soon as possible, although the vulnerability only directly affects Infura, MEW, MyCrypto, etc. serving JSONRPC Parity Ethereum nodes, but it is recommended that all Ethereum nodes update their own nodes immediately. According to previous news, Ethereum Parity officially released an announcement that the client found a vulnerability. An attacker can send a specific RPC request to a public Ethereum Parity node, causing the node to crash and threatening a large proportion of the Ethereum infrastructure. [2/5/2019]

On May 14, Ethereum core developers held a conference call. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko updated the results of the meeting and said that most of the meeting was focused on resolving the final details of the London upgrade. The London upgrade will be included in EIP-3541, EIP-3554. Among them, EIP-3541 prevents the deployment of contracts starting with "0xEF", laying the foundation for a large-scale EVM overhaul (EIP-3540); EIP-3554 proposes to delay the difficulty bomb until December.

In addition, the meeting discussed the time for the London upgrade of the testnet. Ropsten is scheduled at block height 10399301 (June 9), Goerli is scheduled at block height 4979794 (June 16), and Rinkeby is scheduled at block height 8813188 (6 July 23), the main network is still scheduled to be upgraded on July 14. After the first test network is successfully forked, the main network client upgrade block will be determined.

The calculation of the difficulty bomb delay was proposed by Ethereum core developer James Hancock. “The difficulty bomb was there all the time, we just dialed back the blocktime a bit to temporarily ‘defuse’ the bomb,” Hancock told Decrypt. He proposed delaying the bomb by 9700000 blocks.

blocktime graph on Etherscan. James Hancock contributed this note to Decrypt.

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko told Decrypt that developers dismissed proposals to delay the difficulty bomb until next spring. He said it wasn't necessary.

Ethereum developers expect that by December, the network will be updated to allow communication between ethereum 1.0 (the network that relies on PoW) and ethereum 2.0 (the new network that relies on PoS). This is the so-called merge (Merge).

“If the merger is done by December, we don’t need to do anything about the difficulty bomb because we will drop mining altogether,” added Beiko.

If the merger plan still doesn't materialize, ethereum's Shanghai fork is expected to take place in October, which will delay the launch of the difficulty bomb again. The difficulty bomb has been delayed three times so far: first in October 2017, then in February 2019, and finally in January 2020.

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