ETH has activated the difficulty bomb - on the way to freeze -> POS

Why is this exciting? Is there anything new in this post?

I attached the Google Translated version:

Ethereum: Winter is approaching!
Posted on 30. May 2017 by Christoph Bergmann // 24 Comments
Sailing on Ice. Picture of Simon Matzinger via flickr.com. License: Creative Commons
Ethereum sails into the ice age: The Difficulty bomb begins to make itself felt by the miners needing more and more to find new blocks. This ride into the ice age should help to master the transition to Proof of Stake.

The Difficulty Bomb of Ethereum is barely visible. Since the beginning of the year, the price of the second-most important crypto diet has been rising steadily, and with it also the Hashrate of the Miner as well as, naturally, also the Difficulty.

If one looks closely, however, one can see that the Difficulty increases a bit faster than the Hashrates. Actually, both should run synchronously or the Hashrate should the Difficulty advance.

Increase of Hashrate and Difficulty superimposed. In less full blue is the Difficulty, which decouples over time from the Hashrate. Source of the chart: Creative Commons
It is normal that the difficulty of the cryptographic puzzles that the miners have to solve increases with the computational force that they pump into the network. This is so with every crypto diet, and it is ensured that the period between the blocks and the rate at which new coins are generated remain stable. Without an adaptation of the difficulty to the Hashrates, every crypt-diet would suffer galloping inflation.

At Ethereum, this balance slowly and gently but surely waver. The difficulty increases faster than the hashrate. The result is that the system slows down. While a block has been created every 14 seconds, it now takes more than 15. This is not much, but a significant rash.

At the same time, the daily rate with which new ethers arise is decreasing. In January and February the miners still created around 30,000 ethers per day. Today it is only about 27,500. If the blocks fall slower, less ethers are produced during the day. Is clear.

So far the effects of the Difficulty bomb are still harmless. They may be visible in the charts but do not affect the usability of Ethereum in the least.

However, the effect will increase considerably over the course of the year. The Difficulty increases exponentially. It is expected that the gaps between the blocks will increase to as much as 30 seconds in summer or fall, which will have halved the generation of new coins as well as the capacity of the network. In the course of the following months and years, the Difficulty will rise more and more quickly, to the extent that it becomes largely impossible for the miners to find a block. Then Ethereum will be frozen.

Planned obsolescence for gentle change to Proof of Stake
The Ethereum developers have not planted this ice age without reason. It serves as a kind of planned obsolescence, which ensures that a certain version of Ethereum is unavailable from a certain point in time, and thus encourages both developers and Miner and users to contribute radical changes. A bit like this, the Hardfork, as one must have experienced at Bitcoin for a good 24 months, is impossible thanks to the ice age at Ethereum.

A second and perhaps more important reason for the difficulty bomb is, however, the planned change from Ethereum from PoW to PoS . PoW means "proof of work" and means that the miners compete for the block reward by proving that their computers consume computing cycles. PoS, on the other hand, means "proof of stake" and means that the miners do not invest real computer performance, but only emitters with which they buy simulated miners and compete with them for the blocks. Instead of Miner they are called Staker.

PoS is more environmentally friendly, lowers the threshold for initial investments into the mining, allows for lower interweaving between the blocks, and is a prerequisite for sharding the blockchain with which Ethereum wants to achieve almost endless scalability. So it might be worth it to go this way.

The plan, with which Ethereum wants to switch to Proof of Stake, is elegant. Firstly, during the Metroplis era, Mining and Staking are still going to go parallel. The stakers will use a "Caspar" contract to include emitters and validate blocks. At the same time, the timing of the blocks is further determined by the proof of work, the miners.

Since, however, the mining time of the Ice Age is continually increasing, mining will inevitably be less worthwhile than the staking. So there should be a gentle transition to Proof of Stake, driven by the economic incentives of miners and stakers.

Ice time reached blockchain with delay
Originally, the Difficulty Bomb was introduced on 7 September 2015. The plan was, as Stephen Tual said at the Ethereum Foundation's blog at the time , that the Difficulty starting from block 200,000 - still in September 2015 - should begin to rise exponentially. "About one year," writes Tual at this time, "the network will still be usable for about 3-4 months, but then enter an 'ice age': the difficulty will be too high for someone to find a block , This will allow us to introduce PoS. "

Actually, the Ethereum blockchain should have been practically unused until late 2016. However, it was clear to the developers during 2016 that they had over-estimated. It was not possible to meet this deadline for PoS. So with the Hardfork to Homestead version of Ethereum, they have somewhat defused the Difficulty bomb. Vitalik Buterin wrote about a year ago : "... the ice age will now be very slow ... From block 3.5 million (about one year), we will have an average blockinterwall of 25 seconds for about 100,000 blocks (about one month) to have; Then we will have 35 seconds for the next 100,000 blocks (now about 1.4 months), then ~ 55 seconds for about 2.2 months, then ~ 95 seconds for about 3.8 months,

Like all exponential functions, the Difficulty Bomb starts slowly, barely visible, then explodes relatively suddenly. Since the hashrates of the miners simultaneously increase continuously, the ice age will only become apparent later than planned. According to the calculations of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum should be today with a block number of 3.7 million and a few crushed at a block interwall of about 55 seconds. In fact, it is only 15. The reason is that the miners have invested heavily in new mining hardware over the last few months and thus pushed the Hashrates high. Under normal circumstances this would make the interweaving between the blocks shorter rather than longer.

Even the already delayed ice age will arrive later than planned. While the increase in difficulty and block-time is likely to become more and more apparent in the coming months, it is unlikely that effective functional restrictions will occur before spring 2018.

Until then, the Ethereum core developers have already arrived in the metropolis phase of Ethereum. The timetable of Ethereum consists of four phases - Frontier, Homestead, Metroplis and Serenity - each of which is initiated by a Hardfork and represents a section in the completion of Ethereum. Currently we are in Homestead, the stage dedicated to the creation of graphic wallets and security. With Metropolis Ethereum wants to attack the mass market. Part of this new version will be the introduction of the Caspar Proof of Stake, which is still to run parallel to the Mining. Only when the Ice Age really hits, Proof of Stake will push out the mining. This will then initiate the Serenity Phase.

Still, the Ethereum developers have not yet finally agreed on what should be pure in the Metropolis Hardfork. While many changes are still complete, the final version of Caspar is still missing, and there are still some disagreements, such as whether to lower the mining reward. Therefore, the developers have not yet called a concrete date for Metropolis . However, a release is planned in August or September.

Until then, the gaps between the blocks will have grown to more than 20, perhaps even 30, seconds. This shortage of the production of new ethers may be attractive to speculators. Those who want to work with Ethereum, at this point, are starting to wish the developers to follow their schedule.