Ethereum aims to delay the difficulty bomb on its Muir Glacier hard fork for another four million blocks that mean two years wait.

Recently, Ethereum had proposed a new hard fork named Muir Glacier in which it aims to update the difficulty bomb. The difficulty bomb which is also known as an ice age is a piece of code embedded in 2015. This piece of code is linked to the transition of the ETH network.

Difficulty Bomb is being put off for 4,000,000 blocks

It is revealed that Ethereum is planning on delaying the difficulty block on Muir Glacier’s hard fork that is scheduled to be held on Jan 2020. The Difficulty Bomb or ice age might be delayed for another four million blocks that are about two years.

The reason behind this delay is that the difficulty upgrades take every 100,000 blocks. This means that the difficulty decreases when the block time reaches twenty seconds while the difficulty increases when the block time is closer to ten seconds. The company cannot change the entire mechanism, therefore they plan to delay this upgrade.

This is not the first time that the difficulty bomb has delayed. Ethereum developers put it off by three million and two million blocks respectively at the time of Byzantium and Constantinople hard forks. A product manager at GNosis, Eric Conner has again brought it to the attention of the community.

The Difficulty bomb is Complex and Confusing

Ethereum’s Ice age or Difficulty bomb is complex and confusing. It is causing an increase in the hashing difficulty in the mining algorithm that is used to give rewards to the miners on ETH blockchain.

The difficulty bomb reduces the speed of the production of the block on the Ethereum blockchain. Hancock believes that this delay would give Ethereum developers the time to decide whether they should update the difficulty bomb or should completely remove it.