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the difficulty bomb has begun to take effect, so you can expect at least 10% faster blocks (2 second average) after fork.
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the difficulty bomb has begun to take effect, so you can expect at least 10% faster blocks (2 second average) after fork.
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Looking at the "Average Block Time" chart over at etherscan shows that the difficulty bomb hasn't started yet. Our average block times are still around 14-15 seconds unlike 30 seconds last Oct-Nov.
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hrmm I thought it was to be between 12-13 seconds. just rechecked the white paper and can not find this value any where.
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Even Gavin Wood's "yellow paper" (https://github.com/ethereum/yellowpaper) doesn't explicitly refer to a 15 second block time. Neither does the official Geth implementation code (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/).
Both just refer to an allowed range of 9 to 17 seconds for the block time where no difficulty adjustment is needed (excluding the "ice age" exponential increase). It can be seen in the yellow paper in equation 44 on p.6; as well as implemented in the Geth code in lines 339-354 of "consensus.go" (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/blob/master/consensus/ethash/consensus.go).
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The "ice age" difficulty addition can be seen by following the formulas used in the paper (and code): take the block number, subtract 3 million ("ice age" delay in Byzantium), divide by a hundred thousand, subtract two from that, and raise 2 to that result.
So, for example: during the ~30 second block times seen mid-Oct 2017 before the "ice age" was delayed (ie. the subtract 3 million from block number step above), block numbers were in the 4.3 million range and thus had an "ice age" difficulty addition of 2^41. To get the resulting network difficulty increase from that, it can be approximated by multiplying this value by 700: so around ~1.5 petahash of network difficulty due to the "ice age" effect during mid-Oct (note: this is network difficulty, not network hashrate).
Once the "ice age" delay was implemented by subtracting 3 million from the block number in the Byzantium implementation, we can see the resulting drop of that ~1.5 petahash from the network difficulty after mid-Oct.
Right now, with the block number at around the 6.3 million mark, the current Byzantium "ice age" delay code would mean the network difficulty increase is only around ~1.5 terahash (ie. 6.3 million less 3 million, divide by 100k, subtract two, raise 2 to result => 2^31, times 700 to approximate network difficulty increase). Since the total difficulty is already around 3 petahash, the "ice age" effect currently only has a small-ish effect.
So, when the Constantinople "ice age" delay goes into effect (ie. subtract 5 million, instead of 3 million, from block number) I don't think removal of the current ~1.5 terahash "ice age" difficulty would put much of a dent in the current 3 petahash total network difficulty.
