Let's not let the Chinese New Year! Ethereum's "Muir Glacier" hard fork upgrade timed too badly

This article comes fromBitcoinist, original author: Christine Vasileva

Odaily Translator |

Odaily Translator |

As we all know, on January 1, 2020, the "Muir Glacier" hard fork should delay the difficulty bomb again. (Odaily Jun o-daily note: Beijing time should be January 2, 2020)

secondary title

Has the "Istanbul" Hard Fork Forgot the Delayed Difficulty Bomb?

Why the "Muir Glacier" hard fork upgrade was chosen at the beginning of the new year 2020 is not clear yet, but some in the Ethereum community suspect that the developers may have forgotten the decentralized difficulty during the "Istanbul" hard fork upgrade a few weeks ago this matter. Although the content of this adjustment is relatively small, after the completion of the New Year celebrations, the employees and node operators of various exchanges have to climb out of bed to upgrade the client, which seems a bit too cruel.

Bitcoin supporter and Blockstream Chief Strategy Officer Samson Mow expressed dissatisfaction on Twitter, implying that the timing of this hard fork was bad:

"Ethereum asked everyone to prepare for the hard fork on New Year's Day, so happy!"

According to the information disclosed by Ethernodes, currently about 72% of the nodes are ready to update for this "Muir Glacier" hard fork, but still about 28% of users may slowly adjust their protocol. In the past three months, the mining volume of Ethereum has dropped by about 20% due to the rising difficulty of mining - obviously, for Ethereum miners, once they find that it is getting more and more difficult to mine blocks Transactions will no longer be verified to wait for more favorable mining conditions, but this will pose a threat to the security of the Ethereum blockchain.

secondary title

What is "Muir Glacier"?

According to previously disclosed information, "Muir Glacier" will be implemented at block height 9,200,000. If the hard fork is implemented smoothly, the difficulty bomb will be frozen until 4 million new blocks are mined, which means Ethereum will not be threatened by the difficulty bomb for at least the next few years.

secondary title

Miners abandon high-difficulty mining, leading to a sharp drop in the price of Ethereum?

As mining difficulty has increased, the price of Ethereum has fallen to depressing levels, falling from levels close to $200 to around $130 now. At the time of writing, Ethereum was trading at $131.85, a 2.45% drop in 24 hours, according to Coinmarketcap data. Although Ethereum has seen a small recovery, the community generally believes that the larger decline cannot be stopped. Of course, some people look at this matter more optimistically. Once the exchange is successfully upgraded, it will eventually be synchronized and added to the correct version of the protocol.

However, the omission of “Istanbul” to adjust the difficulty bomb also made the community feel that the Ethereum development team did not do a good job in network governance. Meanwhile, ethereum developers are still planning several upgrades to launch version 2.0 of ethereum.

What's "interesting" is that when the previous "Istanbul" hard fork was upgraded, it also encountered various troubles, and most nodes delayed the update until the last moment. Although the "Istanbul" hard fork was successfully passed in the end, it was different from the test network hard fork, which eventually led to the split of two chains. In fact, these practices of Ethereum have aroused great concern from the Bitcoin community, and also criticized the Ethereum community. For example, Weiss Crypto Ratings tweeted:

"Vitalik Buterin has proposed a faster method of migrating data to ETH 2.0, which means that the long-awaited upgrade may come sooner than expected. However, in the ETH 2.0 system, consider ETH 1.0 as a shard The idea is too simple, and many technical details still need to be sorted out.”