We could expect that block time on the old version 1.0 could take more than a couple of hours or might not be confirmed at all. Recently, a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4345) was drafted and it proposes to delay the Ethereum difficulty bomb to May 2022. This will be the fifth time the difficulty bomb is delayed. This is great news for all the miners!

But what exactly is a difficulty bomb and what does it do?

What is a difficulty bomb?

A difficulty bomb is a rule on the Ethereum blockchain that gets executed on a hardcoded block height and cannot be changed without a protocol update. It is a part of the Ethereum migration process from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.

The difficulty bomb will exponentially increase the difficulty of mining, thus increasing block time from the current 15 seconds. This will consequently influence the mining profits and will lower the decentralization of the Proof-of-Work Ethereum chain - this is done deliberately.

Why do we need an Ethereum difficulty bomb?

The quick answer is to force the old Ethereum node users to update their nodes to the latest version.

Let me explain this further.

If the main Ethereum chain is being forked to Proof-of-Stake, all the nodes need to be updated to the latest version of the protocol, let’s call it version 2.0. If nodes are not updated, they still use the old protocol rules, let’s call this version 1.0, which in this case is the Proof-of-Work chain. The old rules are not compatible with the new ones.

This creates two different Ethereum chains. An old version 1.0 chain and a new 2.0 chain that cannot communicate with each other. Each chain operates independently of each other and could cause issues on the exchanges, dApps, or other Ethereum based platforms.

The difficulty bomb forces all the version 1.0 users to update to the latest 2.0 version, or they will not be able to use version 1.0 Ethereum chain as the difficulty, and thus block time will increase too much. We could expect that block time on the old version 1.0 could take more than a couple of hours or might not be confirmed at all.

If the developers would stop working on the Ethereum project, without delaying the difficulty bomb, the Ethereum blockchain would become practically unusable.

Luckily even after Ethereum goes to Proof-of-Stake, NiceHash will continue to support all GPU miners and provide best possible mining profitability. Read the article about what you should mine with after the Ethereum goes to PoS.

You can share your opinions about the difficulty bomb and other Ethereum features with other members of our community in our Reddit or Discord server.