ETH Difficulty Bomb Delayed, Muir Glacier Hard Fork Completed

ETH difficulty bomb was delayed on January 1^st as the new Muir Glacier hard fork happened with the start of the New Year with the goal to prevent the network from freezing so let’s see in the ethereum news below what will it bring to the network.

Muir Glacier was initially proposed because of a delay in the ETH Difficulty Bomb and as said by Tim Beiko the product manager that works in Ethereum explained:

‘’Muir Glacier gives the bomb’s fuse another 4 million blocks, or approximately 611 days. This is meant to give developers more time to find a long-term solution.’’

One of the largest issues with the difficulty bomb is that it is very hard to simulate or predict the effects on the network. The cause of this unpredictability is mainly because of the complex mechanism that calculates block times. The update suggests two long term solutions to the difficulty bomb which is an update to make it more predictable or remove it entirely. Ethereum initially introduced the difficulty bomb back in 2015 which guarantees a hard fork point in the following 16 months.

Unlike the scheduled reward halving on coins such as Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum’s difficulty bomb increases the amount of time that it is needed to mine the blocks. Not only does this cause the block rewards to drop, but given enough time it would also bring the network to a stop as transaction times and the fees skyrocketed exponentially. The solution was meant to encourage an upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 and force the entire community into an agreement allowing everyone that disagreed to ‘’fork off’’ as Ethereum Classic did back in October 2016.

Four years later, Ethereum’s proof of stake chain has yet to launch due to the different engineering challenges and Ethereum 2.0 is scheduled to launch in the first quarter this year (2020). These delays pushed the ETH difficulty bomb back three times since in 2015 and in 2018 with the Byzantium hard fork and the second time was in 2019 as a part of the Constantinople hard fork. Ethereum developers started to take further notice while others question the merit of the difficulty bomb altogether.