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September 16, 2017, 10:38:39 AM Last edit: September 16, 2017, 02:32:42 PM by Vann |
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The Byzantium fork which as of the last dev meeting is scheduled for around October 9th, will be the first of two forks in preparation for the Metropolis fully POS switch. Until those two forks happen, Ethereum won't be switching to fully POS and it's expected to be at least 6 months at the earliest.
The fork scheduled for next month will roll back all of the ICE AGE difficulty increases. Returning the POW back to where the difficulty is predicated on the network hash rate and also reduce the block times back to 15 seconds. The block reward will also be reduced to ~3 ETH, so that inflation remains about the same as where it is now.
Until that fork happens next month, the scheduled ICE AGE difficulty ramp up will happen on September 24th as planned, which will make ETH marginally profitable until the fork rolls back all those changes.
POW and POS are two different ways of reaching consensus for blockchain transactions. POW uses mining algorithms and mining hash rate, POS requires a stake in the currency to participate. The currency is the same for both types.
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