2Ether
The thirdening and the difficulty bomb: how the Constantinople fork affected small Ethereum miners. As you know, Ethereum is supposed to transfer from Proof-of-Work mining to Proof-of-Stake. PoW is extremely wasteful and slow, and a PoW-based coin cannot scale efficiently, because all miners have to work on the same puzzle simultaneously. Proof-of-Stake is easier, more environmentally friendly and cost-efficient. It’s probably the way of the future — but for miners, it’s not great. With PoS, they will only earn the transaction fees — and no block rewards at all. If Ethereum suddenly rolls out a critical up date that includes PoS, chances are that most miners won’t accept it. So how do you make miners switch to PoS? That’s right, by making the old PoW way unprofitable. To achieve this, Ethereum has embedded in its code a nifty and dangerous device — the so-called difficulty bomb. Difficulty means how hard it is to find the solution to each block’s puzzle. The more difficult...