Ethereum miners claim to have deactivated what is called a “difficulty bomb”. As he approaches Ethereum merger event called “The Merge”as we had previously published in Cointelegraph, there are other facts that mark the division of opinions of the network. One of these cases has to do with a team called ETHPoW, whose leader published an open letter discussing his firm plan to fork Ethereum. Why? Ethereum is a network whose consensus method is Proof of Work (PoW), and soon will migrate to Proof of Stake (PoS).
Ethereum mining It consists of computationally solving complex mathematical algorithms, which entails a great cost of energy and hardware, and that generates dividends for the miners.. This is what motivates you to purchase the hardware, tune up and maintain the “rigs” Y “farms” mining.
When migrating to Proof of Stake, the Ethereum network will trigger a “difficulty bomb“, that what he will do will be exponentially increase the difficulty of mining the network. This will make it almost impossible to mine blocks, therefore it is assumed that it will be unfeasible to do so. The miners, whose dividends will be reduced or cancelled, will have the option to mine with your computers on another network or, as in this case, update your software by deactivating the difficulty bomb and perform a hard fork of Ethereumto continue mining.
In the published letter, it can be read: “This Ethereum upgrade, “The Merge”, will inevitably result in a hard fork of Ethereum, and whatever your objections, there are communities, exchanges and miners on the other side of the fence. If you haven’t picked up on this powerful consensus in the last week, we’ll have to let you know in September with the facts. It won’t be easy, but the biggest, strangest and most extraordinary things in the world are always dangerous and far away. We have now defused the difficulty bomb and completed testnet preparation“.
Also, inside the letter Metamask is criticizedthe well-known wallet, after have informed that they will only support ETHPoS (the net “new“). For the leader of ETHPoW, “technically, adding a string is just adding an RPC interface, and for wallet users, it’s just a ‘one-click’ effort on our website“.
The previous Ethereum Hard Fork: Ethereum Classic
EthereumClassic is a Blockchain-based open source platform that enables smart contracts and has a Turing-complete programming language. EthereumClassic was born after the Ethereum hard fork that took place in 2016 after the collapse of DAO. The Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum Blockchain backed by the people who believed in the basic principles of Ethereum such as the Blockchain immutability and that “the code is law“.
Recall that they denied the need for a hard fork to repair damage after someone exploited the DAO vulnerabilities. ETC, just like ETH, provides smart contracts and a development platform. The ETC team aims to use their product on the Internet of Things to provide machine-to-machine communication.
Now we just have to wait and see what happens this time, for now there are two recommended articles to read about this merger:
The price of ETH and ETC
At the time of writing, Ethereum is around $1,893 and Ethereum Classic is around $41.70. according to Binance data
Ethereum Price – Source: Binance
Ethereum Classic Price – Source: Binance
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