Although the date chosen by the developers of Ethereum to deploy this hard fork of the network (the day after Christmas Eve) is not judicious in the eyes of many users, this minor modification of the protocol has however its reason for being. Explanations.
@leseieux
The difficulty bomb, a crucial parameter for the functioning of Ethereum
Just like on the Bitcoin network, Ethereum works for the moment thanks to a proof of work algorithm . The miners of the network are in competition to find a hash allowing to connect their mined block to the rest of the chain. And just like on the Bitcoin network, a block creation time interval is defined by the protocol: on Ethereum, the block creation time must be between 10 and 20 seconds.
In order to regulate this time interval, the Ethereum protocol automatically adjusts the network mining difficulty according to the inter-block delay. As on Bitcoin, the difficulty increases in case of too short delay and decreases in case of too long delay.
But there is a detail - within this mechanism, the developers have implemented a parameter greatly influencing the difficulty of the network: the difficulty bomb, or difficulty bomb .
Every 100,000 blocks, the difficulty bomb increases the difficulty of the network: first in small increments , then gradually exponentially . After a while, the difficulty will be “frozen”: this is why we are talking about the ice age of Ethereum.
The idea is to discourage miners , once Ethereum has passed proof of stake , from continuing to mine using proof of work (the difficulty then becoming too high).
Muir Glacier: delay of the difficulty bomb
It is difficult to estimate the moment when the effects of the difficulty bomb will begin to be felt over the block creation time. Thus, during the development of the last hard fork ( Istanbul ), it was expected that the effects of the difficulty bomb would start to appear around mid-2020. But not everything is going as planned: as of October 2019, high inter-block delays have been noted
Obviously, a poorly adjusted difficulty and too long block creation times lead to congestion of the network as well as a drop in income for miners (the price of ether being at its lowest). The motivation behind the Muir Glacier hard fork is therefore to delay the difficulty bomb immediately (by 4 million blocks, or approximately 610 days). This change will be implemented via an EIP (Ethereum Improvment Proposal), EIP 2387 .
Hard fork Muir Glacier: what to do?
The hard fork is scheduled for block 9,200,000, which should fall during the course of January 1, 2020.
If you are a simple network user with ethers on a currency exchange platform, a mobile wallet, an online wallet or a hardware wallet, you do not have to worry about this update.
If, on the other hand, you are using a full Ethereum client , or if you have a working Ethereum node , you must download the following updates @leserieux
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