Why is Ethereum undergoing the "Muir Glacier" hard fork?

秦晓峰

Odaily资深作者

@QinXiaofeng888

2019-12-23 15:50 (UTC+8)

This article is about 1776 words, reading the full article takes about 3 minutes

Core Measure: Postpone the difficulty bomb.

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Core Measure: Postpone the difficulty bomb.

Author | Qin Xiaofeng

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced | Odaily

Editor | Hao FangzhouEthereum officialThis morning,

Ethereum official

The announcement stated that the hard fork upgrade will be carried out at the block height of 9200000 (January 1, 2020, Beijing time). This upgrade is named "Muir Glacier", and the specific date may change due to block generation time and time zone.

secondary title

1. Why upgrade again?

On December 8 this year, Ethereum carried out its second hard fork upgrade this year-the Istanbul hard fork upgrade.

This also makes many people wonder, why does Ethereum have to upgrade again after less than a month? The root cause is that the Ethereum difficulty bomb has already been activated.

The difficulty bomb (Difficulty bomb) is a difficulty redirection mechanism built into the Ethereum workload proof algorithm, which maintains the average block time by controlling the mining difficulty required to mine new blocks. If the block time is too short (less than 10 seconds) or too long (greater than 20 seconds), the difficulty will increase accordingly.

In fact, entering the ice age is also the established plan of Ethereum, which forces miners and users to switch to Ethereum 2.0 and use the new chain. However, at present, Ethereum 2.0 is not complete, and it is difficult to shoulder the heavy responsibility. So the difficulty bomb has to be postponed until Ethereum 2.0 is ready.

Since the launch time of the difficulty bomb is difficult to estimate, before the Istanbul hard fork upgrade is deployed this year, the developers expect the difficulty bomb to be launched in mid-2020. Therefore, the plan to "delay the difficulty bomb" is placed in subsequent upgrades.

However, this estimate is wrong. On October 5th, the difficulty bomb was activated at the block height of 8600000, which had little impact on the block generation time; on November 22nd, the difficulty bomb broke out in an all-round way, and the block generation time was greatly extended from 13.4 seconds to the current 17.2 seconds seconds; in the past month, the daily block production also dropped sharply from 5883 to 4928, a drop of 16%.

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The Ethereum proposal (EIP 2384) states: "Every 100,000 blocks, the average block time will accelerate exponentially. By the end of December 2019, we will see block times of 20 seconds; Seeing 30+ second block times. This will make the chain bloated (congested) and more expensive to use.”

In order to avoid delaying the Istanbul hard fork upgrade, the development team decided to perform a separate hard fork upgrade after the upgrade to delay the difficulty bomb, which is also the source of the "Muir Glacier" hard fork.

The upgrade was named "Muir Glacier" in honor of the geologist Muir, who was the first scholar to accurately propose the concept of glacier activity.EIP 2384secondary titleEric Conner 。

EIP 23842. What is the upgrade content?

,authorEthereum Cat Herdersexpress:

It is suggested that the difficulty bomb be postponed by another 4 million blocks, approximately 611 days later. There is another sentence in the proposal that attracts attention, "It is best to postpone the difficulty bomb again until the expected release time of the final version of Eth 2.0 tools (finality gadget)."
In addition, this hard fork upgrade will also be carried out simultaneously on the Testnet.
express:
The Ropsten testnet block height is 7117117;