ETH Community In Favor Of Reducing The Ethereum Block Reward

The ETH community is in favor of reducing the ETH Block reward down to 1TH with the next hard fork as we are about to read further in the ETH news.

A recent poll shows that a large portion of the ETH community is in favor of reducing the block reward after a month from the Istanbul hard fork and the security and cost reduction improvements for the Ethereum network. Right now, another hard fork is coming and will likely take place on New Year’s Day or at the block 9200000 according to the countdown. Another announcement details the network upgrade.

The Muir Glacier upgrade deals with the Ethereum difficulty bomb or the Ice Age which was hardcoded into the proof of work algorithm just to maintain the average block time by adjusting the difficulty. The mechanism increases every 100,000 blocks by adding more difficulty and then it becomes exponential until there’s a freezeout which is when the Ice Age term comes from. The decreases in the overall performance on the network happen because of the block times. As Ethereum has grown up when it comes to Dapp usage and smart contract as well, the upgrades are needed to delay the difficulty bomb. With the EIP 2384, the Muir Glacier will delay the difficulty bomb for another 4 million blocks or about 600 days.

The node operators and miners will have to update the client software but the hard fork will not have a bad effect on Ethereum holders or traders. Ethereum is still proof of work-based but while BTC has halving Ethereum has gone through block reward reductions and the last one being earlier this year during the Constantinople hard fork. The block reward was decreased from 3 to 2 ETH. At the moment, there’s not another reduction expected until Serenity Phase 2 which will likely happen in 2021. According to a recent vote, about 70 percent of the Ethereum community using Reddit, responded in favor of decreasing the block reward to 1 ETH.

The vote was conducted with the help of a Reddit feature called ‘donuts’’ which essentially tokenizes the karma points on the platform. The ETH trader Sub is the testing ecosystem where the users earn ‘’ donut’’ instead of ‘karma’ which is used to vote.