Ethereum difficulty bomb delayed but network adoption still growing

[FMCPAY_GLOBAL]

The difficulty bomb is designed to plummet mining profitability to disincentivize miners ahead of the long-awaited Merge.

Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the difficulty bomb, a major step leading up to the highly anticipated Merge upgrade for the layer-1 blockchain.

They set the delay to two months in order to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time” according to core developer Tim Beiko in a June 11 tweet.

The difficulty bomb will be a measure to disincentivize ETH mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).

It dramatically increases the difficulty for miners to verify transactions on the network, thus reducing profitability for PoW miners. Eventually, it will become impossible for physical miners to validate a block. The difficulty bomb is a feature of the network added to the code in 2016 as plans for the Merge to become the Consensus Layer (formerly known as ETH 2.0) was being formed.

(Source: Cointelegraph)

[Yogee]

Looks like the happy days of miners will soon come to an end but the announcement couldn't have come at a better time. Everything is crashing down and this gives them the perfect opportunity to use the profits they got when ETH price and the fees were soaring. They can start accumulating in preparation for POS.

[bittick]

Hmmm pretty interesting. I just wanna know how big the inflation in ethereum after the difficulty bomb will be implemented combined with the coin burn hechanism that already exist in ethereum blockchain. The adoption is still continue but it's not so impressive as. a few years ago when the smartcontract platforms have not become mainstream like this time. So, most probably mining farm will be useless in the upcoming years and these days i rarely seen new coin used POW.
Will bitcoin become the only POW coin exist in the market in the next years?

[Yogee]

Hmmm pretty interesting. I just wanna know how big the inflation in ethereum after the difficulty bomb will be implemented combined with the coin burn hechanism that already exist in ethereum blockchain.

I haven't read the reward per lock but inflation should be a lot less than in POW.

The adoption is still continue but it's not so impressive as. a few years ago when the smartcontract platforms have not become mainstream like this time.

That's competition for you.

So, most probably mining farm will be useless in the upcoming years and these days i rarely seen new coin used POW.
Will bitcoin become the only POW coin exist in the market in the next years?

- Dogecoin is still there but I read some rumors of implementing smart contracts so I don't know if that also means moving to POS.
- Litecoin
- Monero remains POW and may stay there indefinitely. I don't see how it can maintain its anonymous transaction by switching to other algo.

[Abiky]

The difficulty bomb is designed to plummet mining profitability to disincentivize miners ahead of the long-awaited Merge.

Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the difficulty bomb, a major step leading up to the highly anticipated Merge upgrade for the layer-1 blockchain.

They set the delay to two months in order to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time” according to core developer Tim Beiko in a June 11 tweet.

...

The difficulty bomb will be a measure to disincentivize ETH mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).

It dramatically increases the difficulty for miners to verify transactions on the network, thus reducing profitability for PoW miners. Eventually, it will become impossible for physical miners to validate a block. The difficulty bomb is a feature of the network added to the code in 2016 as plans for the Merge to become the Consensus Layer (formerly known as ETH 2.0) was being formed.

(Source: Cointelegraph)

I understand developers want to make the PoS upgrade as secure and reliable as possible. But constant delays will upset people as network fees (gas) rise like there's no tomorrow. We've already seen how negatively ETH's price was affected after developers announced the difficulty bomb delay. How much longer will people need to wait until ETH delivers as promised? The longer the PoS upgrade takes, the higher competing chains will rise to glory.

I don't think adoption for ETH will continue to grow among the general public except for miners and whales who have money to throw at it without worry about gas fees. There are Layer-Two scaling solutions for ETH, but that hasn't brought the attention of investors and traders alike. The main chain is what it's all about. If ETH stays bloated, then it will slowly fade into oblivion until it becomes history. I hope ETH can get back on track to prove it's the best cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. Just my opinion