The latest core devs’ meeting centered around various Ethereum Improvement Proposals to reduce or maintain block rewards distributed to miners. ETHNews attempts to clear up the mud surrounding the discussion.
On Friday, August 24, Ethereum's core devs and other stakeholders within the community gathered for meeting 45[1]. Aside from updates related to testing, clients, and research, the crew discussed the upcoming Constantinople hard fork[2] and the topic of issuance reduction (that is, reducing miners' block rewards).
Issuance of block rewards, although an evergreen, seemingly nebulous issue within the Ethereum space, took center stage at the meeting. Important to this subject is the difficulty bomb[3], or the gradual increase in mining difficulty to the point where an Ethereum "ice age" (or lack of mining) would occur. This works so that as the network's hashrate increases[4], the difficulty increases. This bomb was originally put in place to incentivize the move toward proof of stake, but as transfer to Casper[5] continues to be pushed back, the community must decide what to do in the meantime. Apparently, simply delaying the difficulty bomb will create a sudden increase in issuance of block rewards, leading to inflation. To counteract that, developers are proposing a number of EIPs to reduce block rewards.
According to the discussion this past Friday, there are three issuance-related EIPs in competition to be included with the Constantinople hard fork. Each EIP seeks to delay the inevitable bomb rather than defuse it, but the proposed block reward amounts vary: EIP 858 would reduce the reward to 1 ETH per block, EIP 1234 would reduce it to 2 ETH per block, and EIP 1295 would maintain the 3 ETH reward. In addition to supporting different EIPs, those in attendance
