Developers delay implementation of “difficulty bomb” on Ethereum by two months

After a meeting on Friday (10), the developers of Ethereum they postponed the launch of the “difficulty bomb” on the network by two months. The engine would be installed in June, but now the implementation will only take place in August.

According to the group, it was decided to postpone the implementation after an evaluation of the Merge test on the Ropsten network. Apparently, the test revealed a number of flaws in the engine. Therefore, the developers felt that it was better to defer execution.

The original postponement proposal, called EIP-5133, called for the implementation to be delayed until September, but they decided on the date in August. It is the fifth time in seven years that the ETH team has postponed the deployment of the bomb.

Decision causes further delays

The engine is a crucial catalyst for the release of The Merge update. It is the difficulty bomb that will finalize the migration of ETH mining from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake.

Since its inception, Ethereum has had plans aimed at exchanging the mining algorithm. So much so that the pump mechanism has been in the currency code since 2015. But it was only in the last two years that the transition started.

However, the test network results revealed some flaws, as pointed out by Cryptheory. The first of these was the loss of several blocks, which the team kept an eye on.

After evaluating the results, the team and Tim Beiko, the main developer of ETH, confirmed the decision.

“In short, we agree with the bomb delay,” Beiko tweeted, “Our goal is to have a delay of about 2 months and release an update in late June.”

At first, Beiko and the ETH developers did not say whether this would delay the implementation of The Merge. In fact, they didn’t even set an initial deadline.

But then ETH founder Vitalik Buterin and developer Preston Van Loon spoke up. The two stated that the stipulated deadline was in August.

What is the difficulty bomb?

Currently, miners use computers and processing power to validate ETH blocks. For this, they provide computational power to the network, which guarantees the security of the ETH.

In return, miners receive rewards for each block mined. The process works the same as in Bitcoin, but with technical differences.

The Merge update will totally change this process. Miners will be turned into validators and will no longer provide computing power. Instead, they will use their cryptocurrencies to validate blocks on the network.

To prevent miners from rejecting PoS, the difficulty bomb will drastically increase the block’s difficulty. In this way, miners will not have enough computing power to mine the blocks, forcing them to migrate the algorithm.