It seems Ethereum “difficulty bomb” may cause the network to grind to a halt unless it transitions to PoS. It was put in place to spur the transition off of PoW and wasting electricity, but has been delayed for years and years.
And now it has become a real issue: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-ice-age-may-be-imminent-if-miners-withdraw-from-network
@Jason even if this fork is accepted, they better get their act together by 2021 or Ethereum may be in for a lot of trouble.
I think the Ethereum Improvement Proposal will be implemented which eliminates the necessity to delay ‘Ethereum Ice Age.’ The difficulty time bomb was poorly thought out. Difficulty Freeze begins at a pre-determined block height when the network difficulty is frozen. Any further soft fork or hard fork will be subject to this difficulty freeze.
With a Difficulty Freeze, it will be more likely that issuance would increase. Clients are then motivated to prevent this and keep clients syncing effectively.
The Ethereum is an interesting project, it was very profitable to mine once.
But how will the network of projects feel when it switches to POS? I think it won’t be good for ETH. But I could be wrong.