Ethereum welcomes hard fork upgrade again, Reddit community supports block rewards reduced to 1 ETH

A recent survey showed that a large part of the Ethereum community (at least on Reddit) supports reducing the number of block rewards and ETH issuance after the next hard fork.

Ethereum upgrade is approaching

The Istanbul upgrade introduced some interoperability, security, and cost reduction improvements to the Ethereum network, less than a month ago.

Today, Ethereum is about to conduct another hard fork, most likely on New Year's Day, or a block height of 900000.

• The road to low-defense DeFi: how to achieve it? Let's take a look at these four options
• DeFi's windfall, ConsenSys researchers find that DeFi is driving Ethereum decentralization
• Nine developments, based on the performance of Lightning Network in a year, can you submit satisfactory answers?

The Muir Glacier upgrade handles the Ethereum difficulty bomb or Ice Age, which has been hard-coded into the PoW algorithm and maintains the average block time by adjusting the difficulty.

For every 100,000 blocks, this mechanism adds more difficulty. It starts slowly and then grows exponentially until a "freezeout" situation occurs. This is also the origin of the Ice Age term. This will reduce the overall performance of the network due to the increase in block generation time.

As Ethereum is increasingly used in dApps and smart contracts , these upgrades are necessary for delaying the difficulty bomb. With EIP 2384, the Muir Glacier upgrade will delay the difficulty bomb by 4 million blocks, or about 600 days.

Node operators and miners will need to update their client software, but a hard fork will not affect Ethereum holders or traders.

Support for reducing block rewards

Currently, Ethereum is still based on the PoW algorithm, which is the same as Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been halved several times. Ethereum also has a process of reducing block rewards. The latest block reward reduction was a hard fork in Constantinople earlier this year. The block reward was reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH.

Judging from the current situation, there will be no further reduction in production before Serenity Phase 2, and it is unlikely to happen before 2021.

According to recent votes, 70% of the Reddit community who participated in the vote supported changing the block reward to 1 ETH.

The poll was conducted using an experimental feature called "donuts" on Reddit, which is used to process karma points on the platform. The voting initiated by the Ethtrader sub-section became a meaningful experiment. Users can get "donuts" through karma points and use them to vote.

The 7.6 million donuts used in this vote were close to 20% of the supply of karma marked on Reddit.

The voting time is chosen when the Muir Glacier is about to upgrade, because the previous upgrade has also been accompanied by a reduction in production. However, this may not represent everyone in the Ethereum community.

When the world's second largest cryptocurrency network is fully switched to PoS, most of the above measures will be meaningless, with output and inflation rates falling sharply. But this may take several years, so ETH 1.0 is still going on.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!