A so-called “mini-ice age” for Ethereum miners sets in as the new difficulty bomb is live. Due to that, the Ethereum daily block reward now is down by approximately 25%. It went from 20,000 to roughly 15,000 ETH per day.
Ethereum at high risk
The ice age protocol automatically initiated the difficulty bomb and now every two weeks the daily block rewards will fall for about 2,000 ETH. This is because of an increase of block times. This puts Ethereum at high risk because no one knows whether the upgrade won't be postponed again. If Constantinople won't go live again the difficulty can rise to such levels that it will be impossible to mine a single block. At the moment ETH block time is about 18 seconds, previously it was around 15. However, the last time difficulty bomb was delayed back in 2017. And then the block time reached a high of 30 seconds per block. Additionally, network fees stay at the same level – at around half a cent.
Some useful links:
Ethereum daily block rewards chart (https://etherscan.io/chart/ethersupply)
The transition to PoS (Proof-of-Stake) (https://bestcoininvestments.com/ethereum-postpones-constantinople-due-to-critical-vulnerability-issues/)
Ethereum faces security risks after a technical audit (https://bestcoininvestments.com/ethereum-postpones-constantinople-due-to-critical-vulnerability-issues/)
The first delay of Constantinople (https://bestcoininvestments.com/ethereum-hard-fork-delayed-and-a-tweet-by-trump/)
What do you think? As we have seen in the past - Ethereum has been in a more difficult situation than this before. Will Constantinople be delayed again? Or in general, how do you think this upgrade will affect Ethereum?
Read a more expanded article here: https://bestcoininvestments.com/ethereum-daily-block-rewards-are-down-by-25/