The nightmare of ETH miners turns out to be this

What is the ETH difficulty bomb?

As we all know, the development of ETH is divided into four stages: Frontier, Home, Metropolis, and Tranquility . The transition between stages needs to be achieved through hard forks .

The original intention of the founder of ETH was to eventually adopt the PoS mechanism . The Constantinople upgrade is to transform the PoW mechanism of proof of work into the PoS mechanism of proof of equity.

In order to smoothly implement the transformation of the formula algorithm, ETH miners need to switch from PoW mining to PoS mining. PoW competes on computing power, so the difficulty of mining needs to be adjusted at this time.

This is when the difficulty bomb comes into being.

It means that when calculating the difficulty, in addition to adjusting it based on the block time and the difficulty of the previous block, a difficulty factor that increases exponentially every 100,000 blocks is added .

In addition to increasing the difficulty of mining due to the increase in computing power, the production of new blocks becomes more complicated and inconvenient.

Why introduce a difficulty bomb?

ETH’s difficulty bomb acts as a deterrent to miners , who may choose to continue using PoW even after the blockchain transitions to PoS.

The main reason they do this may be that the balance of power and profits has shifted from miners to investors and blockchain users.

If not all miners switch to PoS, the ETH blockchain could be in danger of forking .

A good example is the 2017 BTC hard fork to BTC Cash, when BTC miners forced a fork of its blockchain by supporting BTC Cash.

So, the founders of ETH may have foreseen this possibility and programmed its blockchain to increase the difficulty of the mining algorithm .

Why is ETH obsessed with the PoS mechanism?

BTC, which has always been regarded as a benchmark, adopts the PoW mechanism, and the huge computing power system generated by this mechanism makes Bitcoin indestructible . So why does ETH insist on replacing the PoW mechanism?

In fact, the PoW mechanism easily leads to waste of resources . Previous studies have shown that global mining power consumption even reaches 1% of the world's electricity.

At the same time, Pow’s network performance is too low, and it needs to wait for many confirmations. The consensus confirmation cycle is also relatively long, which makes it unsuitable for commercial use. This is why BTC has been criticized.

The PoS mechanism is a proof of stake mechanism that reduces the difficulty of mining in proportion to the proportion of tokens held by each node and the time, thereby speeding up the speed of finding random numbers. The right to record is determined by calculating the percentage of the total number of coins you hold and the time you have owned the coins.

Its advantages are very obvious. It shortens the time to reach consensus, does not require a lot of energy to mine , and is more suitable for commercial use.

However, everything has two sides. Over time, the Matthew effect is likely to occur . Nodes with more tokens will receive more and more token rewards, widening the gap and forming another form of centralization.

In short, the "Constantinople" upgrade is not only the beginning of ETH's transformation to PoS, but also makes it easier to use as a blockchain application platform, building a good ecosystem for the development, application and promotion of Dapp.

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