There’s a lot that’s going to happen with Ethereum in the next couple of months with regards to updates – Metropolis (Byzantium and Constantinople) – but there’s a lot of confusion as to what this entails for the cryptocurrency. There’s the hard fork, the Ethereum Ice Age and Proof-of-Stake so let’s break it down.

Metropolis Split into Two Hard Forks

Ethereum’s move from its current consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Work to the more environment friendly and sustainable Proof-of-Stake is now scheduled to take effect in two parts as revealed during Core Dev meeting on August 25, 2017. The first part – Byzantium – is expected to occur at block 4.3 million on September 22nd with the worst case being block 4.4 million which would take place on October 27th, so realistically the hard fork of Ethereum will occur between those two dates. Byzantium bring with it implementation of 9 out of the 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that together make up Metropolis. The other two, EIP 86 and EIP 96 are expected to be implemented in Constantinople. In practice, what this means is that with Byzantium, we can expect more predictable gas charges and an increase anonymity options with zk-SNARKS or Zero Knowledge Proofs.

Ethereum Ice Age

The Ethereum Ice Age is a difficulty readjustment scheme that was designed to provide an incentive to miners to move to the new blockchain in order to avoid a chain split so that we do not end up with more Ethereum chains. The Difficulty Bomb would raise the difficulty exponentially and make the current blockchain freeze. Assuming the hashing power remains the same, Ethereum could start feeling the effect of this time bomb in 12-14 months after which Ethereum will be forced to either introduce Proof of Stake, to remove this feature or to reset “the clock” on the difficulty bomb. In effect, the increased in difficulty would follow this pattern:

23 seconds now (block 4.2 mln)

30 seconds on Sept. 22nd (block 4.3 mln)

39 seconds on Oct. 27th (block 4.4 mln)

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