Ethereum will be upgraded this Saturday, and developers have agreed to delay the launch of the difficulty bomb

According to Trustnodes reported on December 1, Ethereum will perform an Istanbul Gas Upgrade this Saturday, and developers have agreed to an emergency hard fork within a few weeks of this upgrade.

Image source: visualhunt

In a recent public meeting on Ethereum, all developers and other non-developer attendees (such as marketers or miners) agreed to delay the launch of the difficulty bomb.

• Computing Power is King: Global Treasure Map
• Popular Science | Crypto War, Blockchain Technology
• Is a cryptocurrency scam a new bottle of old wine? Tyler Winklevoss teaches you how to see through at a glance

The meeting discussed whether the difficulty bomb was completely removed or delayed to start. Alexey Akhunov, an Ethereum developer working on rent fees, said:

"So far, the risk / reward ratio of using difficulty bombs has not been high."

Gnosis is an Augur-like Dapp whose marketer Eric Conner opposes the complete removal of the difficulty bomb because he believes that if it is removed, there may be "community" resistance.

But no one objected to delaying the launch. In a discussion about inflationary issuance, Tim Beiko of PegaSys, the ConsenSys protocol engineering unit dedicated to Ethereum client development, stated:

"I want to say that this will be the first time the Ethereum community has resisted a difficulty bomb without changing the distribution."

James Hancock, who calls himself HardFork Coordinator, said:

"In my opinion, we should no longer touch the issue of issuance. As the hash rate drops, I'm not sure if we want to further reduce security spending."

Participants did not discuss why the hash rate dropped, because the answer seems to clearly show that the price of Ethereum has fallen, and the price is affected by the relationship between supply and demand.

Due to the increasing circulation of Ethereum, demand must grow at the same rate to maintain price stability. If demand remains stable, prices will fall, and thus the hash rate will fall. If demand also declines, prices could double.

At present, the price of Ethereum has fallen by 90% compared to its highest point, and its hash rate has not been halved.

Ethereum hash rate chart for November 2019

This means that Ethereum has paid a lot to ensure the security of the network. If the price is compared, the hash rate still has a 40% drop, so it can be said that it will still pay more.

However, the "consensus" of the developers, marketers, and miners involved in this discussion seems to be to quickly eliminate the problem of increasing the difficulty of the algorithm without touching the release.

Wei Tang from Parity says:

"For Parity, bomb delays, bomb cancellations, or reward changes are just simple json configuration changes, so I think we should be able to deploy it in a short time."

Hudson Jameson, an employee of the Ethereum Foundation responsible for public relations for Ethereum developers, said:

"I support the idea of ​​launching in mid-January. Because then we will have enough time to update them regardless of the current state of the nodes."

At a recent conference this year, Hudson Jameson also said that due to the Christmas holiday, 12 copies could not be implemented, so the fork of reducing the issue had to be pushed to the end of February as originally planned.

Now that the Ethereum protocol itself is reducing inflation, holidays are coming, any testnet can be omitted, and auditing can be omitted. Who cares if the node is upgraded? As long as it is fast, because "emergency", the task of the developer is now to launch the PoS chain.

The developers held a conference call to discuss all of these issues, but it was not clear what they discussed in detail, because it was clear that some people thought there were "technical issues" and not enough time.

But developers seem eager to get rid of any pressure from time and strive to eliminate the impact of falling inflation before Bitcoin halves in May next year.

Unlike Ethereum, the halving of bitcoin in May next year will definitely happen, and miners or Dapps / enterprises only need to accept it, because this is the bitcoin protocol and node settings, not some public relations personnel are not inviting the public Discuss monetary policy in the conference room. For some very important transactions, Bitcoiner is happy to wait 10 minutes because they enjoy 10 times the market value, and Gnosis users obviously do not want to wait for 10 seconds.

This is not to say that Gnosis developers should develop something like Layer 2 so that users don't have to wait too long. Obviously, Ethereum holders are paying for these marketers, miners and even developers. They made a very important point last time, calling for reducing Ethereum's block reward to 1 Eth, instead of the 2 Eth that miners and developers want.

In the end, these holders did reduce the block reward to 1 Eth, even below 1 Eth for the USD price. Therefore, this time the miner didn't say anything, but now dapp marketers believe that people can't wait for 10 seconds at all in the actual process of using dapp. In fact, the Ethereum network is already quite crowded, and the call for expansion is high, and the waiting time for users is not a few seconds, but a few minutes.

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