Ethereum developers agree to upgrade network on January 6, ETH inflation rate will rise again

Trustnodes reported on December 2 that Ethereum developers reached a preliminary consensus on a delay in launching the difficulty bomb on a public conference call.

Because the conference call itself had some technical issues, it was unclear what the participants were saying, but Tim Beiko of PegaSys said:

"The current proposal is to upgrade at 9,200,000 blocks, approximately January 6, 2020.

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No objections were raised during the conference call, so we seem to have reached a preliminary consensus: upgrade at 920,000 blocks, named Mountain Glacier, and push the implementation of the difficulty bomb back 9 million blocks. " The currently proposed number is 9 million blocks behind. But developers have agreed to postpone the difficulty bomb by 4 million blocks.

If calculated based on the block production time of 15 seconds, the time of 4 million blocks is about two years, or 700 days. So if this fork is implemented, the difficulty bomb will not start until the end of 2021 or early 2022.

At the same time, the Beacon Chain of Proof of Stake (PoS) may start as early as next spring. This will increase Ethereum's issuance inflation, but how much depends on the number of Eths pledged by users.

In addition, once the fork is completed, Ethereum will increase the inflation rate by an additional 2000Eth per day. Until the difficulty bomb is implemented, the block reward will return from the current 11600 Eth / day to 13600 Eth / day.

Ethereum inflation chart for December 2019

The developers and the Ethereum community have not publicly discussed what exactly to do in terms of inflation and difficulty bomb implementation.

Instead, the developers only decided on inflation policies internally, and initially proposed to name the fork Melting Glacier.

But the name sounded like a bit of civil rights. It was about repealing the Patriotic Act, so they changed the name to Mountain Glacier, although the name still conveyed the same message.

It's like they are melting the ice age (another version of the difficulty bomb). But it can be said that they are indeed melting the real glacier, because mining requires a considerable amount of energy, and the cost of miners is now close to the benefits of mining.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the purpose of PoS is to eliminate miners and make Ethereum very environmentally friendly. But there is still a long way to go to successfully convert to PoS.

Instead, Ethereum will become a kind of mixed network of PoS and PoW mining, although the PoS chain originally had no relationship with the PoW chain.

Some people have suggested that the final stake pledger (Staker) may finally complete the PoW chain conversion through a decentralized checkpoint, but this is a quite complicated problem and a difficult problem to solve.

Without the difficulty bomb, developers may not have the motivation to solve it. It seems that while other major cryptocurrencies are struggling to reduce the inflation rate by 50%, Ethereum plans to increase the inflation rate through "urgent" forks in the days after New Year 2020.

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