Ethereum developers have decided to delay the “Difficulty Bomb” by agreeing to include the code for such a change into Metropolis’ hard fork—Constantinople. The core developers decided on a video call[1], streamed live on YouTube on August 31, 2018, to accept the EIP-1234 scenario for the “Difficulty Bomb’s” impact on block rewards.
Constantinople[2] is a new upgrade of Ethereum’s four-stage development plan. It has been designed to enforce specific reforms that will help in obtaining signature verification and afford users the opportunity of creating account contracts with relative ease. The hard fork[3] will also purify protocols by removing technically stated information that is not necessarily a component of the tree.
Constantinople is primarily designed to be the final half o the protocol upgrade that aims to smooth the transition from a Proof-of-Work consensus to a Proof-of-Stake.
According to a Github post[4], the updated version of EIP 1234 will reduce block rewards from 3 ETH per block to 2 ETH per block and delay the “Difficulty Bomb” for 12 months. The developers at the meeting, also agreed to release another hard fork eight months from the Constantinople upgrade.
Added into ethereum shortly after the network launch, the difficulty bomb was created to make mining ether difficult over time. At its core, the difficulty bomb is also a deterrent for miners who may opt to continue using PoW, after the blockchain transitions to PoS. Ethereum is currently a Proof of Work cryptocurrency, but it would be moved to a move to a Proof of Stake protocol (Casper) to ensure the system continues being scalable and decentralized.
Since the current protocol is not finished, a hard-fork might be required to complete the implementation. For companies, switching to the new network—which uses a
