Ethereum’s block rewards have fallen to their lowest level yet with 10,254 eth per block worth circa $1.5 million a day.

In addition, 410 eth per uncle orphaned blocks and 15 eth for the inclusion of these orphans is given, making it a total of circa 10,700 eth.

Then, there are also fees of about 400 eth a day, so miners receive circa ◊11,000, worth $1,550,560.

Ethereum block rewards drop, Dec 2019

The above automatic reduction is due to an increase in block times to now nearly every 17 seconds.

That’s because the difficulty bomb has kicked-in. That being a protocol level algorithm that artificially increases the difficulty, and thus the amount of hash power, required to find a block.

Ethereum block times rise, Dec 2019

The difficulty bomb is now to be delayed for the third time in two weeks in an “emergency” fork that pushes it back for two years.

No issuance reduction has been proposed by the Ethereum Foundation developers this year, with the fork that was meant to go through on the 6th of January now estimated for the 31st of December.

Unlike the New Year, this won’t happen in Australia first, with all needing to upgrade as otherwise they get forked off.

It appears some 56% of ethereum Geth synced nodes have upgraded, but none of Parity with just two weeks to go.

So this could be a mess, with it unclear when Parity plans to launch the new client especially with the Christmas season and the New Year season.

Why on earth this was rushed so much is not clear because as can be seen above, block times have previously reached even 30 seconds without much problem.

In about two weeks they would be at less than 20 seconds, hardly a show stopping Christmas rush or some emergency requiring an upgrade on the very day everyone is watching the fireworks across the world.

That’s however what devs have decided, so if you were planning to show off your eth fast payments or your defi-ence on New Years eve to your friends, it looks like that may be off for this year as ethereum related services would probably pause.

Thankfully at that time phone services don’t work either, so it might not be too much of a problem, but ethereans in general seem to be in favor of reducing issuance at the same time as the difficulty bomb is delayed.

That’s obviously a discussion that should have been had before the “emergency” fork client was launched, with a decision on what to do in these sort of cases usually requiring input from the ecosystem.

Even a coinvote, which probably in this case would have a majority to reduce it to 1 eth as it did previously.

When such vote was held last year, $40 million worth of eth voted and 70% of that was in favor of reducing it to 1 eth per block.

Unlike Brit’s 52% brexit, however, ethereans didn’t get what they want – although they did get a reduction to 2 eth – and it appears unlikely they will now too as devs have decided there is no time for discussion or anything.

Yet a chain-split can’t be discarded with Parity not even launching their client yet. It’s just a jason parser json config for us, their dev said, “it should be alright for us to deploy it in a short period of time,” they said. So they should be able to do it within Two Weeks.

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