The difficulty bomb is designed to plummet mining profitability to disincentivize miners ahead of the long-awaited Merge.
Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the difficulty bomb, a major step leading up to the highly anticipated Merge upgrade for the layer-1 blockchain.
They set the delay to two months in order to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time” according to core developer Tim Beiko in a June 11 tweet.
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The difficulty bomb will be a measure to disincentivize ETH mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).
It dramatically increases the difficulty for miners to verify transactions on the network, thus reducing profitability for PoW miners. Eventually, it will become impossible for physical miners to validate a block. The difficulty bomb is a feature of the network added to the code in 2016 as plans for the Merge to become the Consensus Layer (formerly known as ETH 2.0) was being formed.
(Source: Cointelegraph)
Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the difficulty bomb, a major step leading up to the highly anticipated Merge upgrade for the layer-1 blockchain.
They set the delay to two months in order to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time” according to core developer Tim Beiko in a June 11 tweet.
...
The difficulty bomb will be a measure to disincentivize ETH mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).
It dramatically increases the difficulty for miners to verify transactions on the network, thus reducing profitability for PoW miners. Eventually, it will become impossible for physical miners to validate a block. The difficulty bomb is a feature of the network added to the code in 2016 as plans for the Merge to become the Consensus Layer (formerly known as ETH 2.0) was being formed.
(Source: Cointelegraph)
I understand developers want to make the PoS upgrade as secure and reliable as possible. But constant delays will upset people as network fees (gas) rise like there's no tomorrow. We've already seen how negatively ETH's price was affected after developers announced the difficulty bomb delay. How much longer will people need to wait until ETH delivers as promised? The longer the PoS upgrade takes, the higher competing chains will rise to glory.
I don't think adoption for ETH will continue to grow among the general public except for miners and whales who have money to throw at it without worry about gas fees. There are Layer-Two scaling solutions for ETH, but that hasn't brought the attention of investors and traders alike. The main chain is what it's all about. If ETH stays bloated, then it will slowly fade into oblivion until it becomes history. I hope ETH can get back on track to prove it's the best cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. Just my opinion
