Ethereum developers to delay difficulty bomb after Istanbul hard fork

• The difficulty bomb won't be activated after the Istanbul update.
• The hard fork will take place on December 7.

The Ethereum development team agreed to an urgent hard fork shortly after the Istanbul update, TrustNodes reports.

The discussion was attended not only by developers of the second cryptocurrency, but also miners, as well as other market participants. All of them supported the proposal to postpone the so-called complexity bomb. The latter is a programmed Proof-of-Work mining restriction to encourage Ethereum ecosystem members to switch to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm.

The participants discussed both the possibility of the complete removal of this mechanism and the postponement. Thus, the developer Aleksey Akunov mentioned that the risk and reward ratio of the complexity bomb was not yet impressive.

However, Augur Project Marketing Specialist Eric Conner opposed the complete removal of the complexity bomb, as it could trigger an adverse reaction in the community.

Touching upon inflation issue, Tim Beiko from PegaSys startup said:

Just wanted to point out that this would be the first push back of the bomb without an issuance change.

It is worth noting that Istanbul hard fork will be launched on block 9,069,000, approximately on December 7.

Istanbul will be the last hard fork on the Ethereum 1.0, network that will pave the way to Serenity and the transition to Ethereum 2.0.

This large-scale update will be preceded by the activation of Casper and the switch to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, sharding, virtual machine update (EWASM), change of cross-contact logic and protocol economics.

Before that, another major update called Berlin will be launched by the end of June 2020

---