A Comprehensive Guide on Ethereum's Muir Glacier
by Blockchain council Blockchain certificationsEthereum
welcomed the new year 2020 in the best possible way- with a network upgrade.
The Muir Glacier hard fork network upgrade was activated on 2 January 2020 at
block number 9,200,200 with a single Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP). Muir
Glacier is a routine network update. Let us get to know more about this in this
article.
What
is Muir Glacier?
It refers to a proposal
for delaying the network feature of the Ethereum blockchain named ‘Ice Age.’
The process of mining Ethereum blocks will be more time-consuming if they are
mined using the proof-of-work consensus unless the Ice Age is pushed back
through a hard fork. The feature was primarily developed in the protocol to
motivate developers to upgrade the network actively. So, the Ice Age began
taking effect much earlier than expected. This created the need for developing
another fork close to the previous fork. Muir Glacier is a routine network
update. All the services will remain operational at the time of the fork. EIP
2384, the proposal using which the Muir Glacier upgrade was activated, delays
the difficulty bomb for 611 days (4,000,000) blocks.
Though subsequent
changes and network upgrades to the difficult bomb have been accompanied by a
change of issuance of Ether, no reduction occurred in the Muir Glacier Upgrade.
Hence, the issuance remains at 2 ETH per block.
What
is the Ice Age?
Ice Age or Ethereum
difficulty bomb is an algorithm that has been designed to increase the difficulty
of mining Ethereum blocks over time.
History
of the Difficulty Bomb?
So, what is the reason
for the existence of the difficulty bomb?
The concept of the
difficulty bomb originates from the initial design of Ethereum. Ethereum has
most often operated under the ethos of ‘continuous innovation.’ This implies
that frequent upgrades need to be done to the Ethereum blockchain. Network
upgrades are a costly affair for the network as, in that case, each node on the
network must be upgraded to the latest version of the protocol. If the nodes
fail to undergo an upgrade, it will result in them being forked off the
network. The coordination costs associated with upgrades have also implied that
blockchain projects avoided them.
This is where the
difficulty bomb comes into the picture. The difficulty bomb was encoded in to
force regular hard forks as a method of normalizing the idea of upgrading the
network. This provided numerous opportunities to make other protocol upgrades.
The difficulty bomb has been reset with respect to making other protocol
changes.
Participating
in Future Ethereum Discussions
With respect to
protocol changes, there were discussions regarding the Ethereum developer call
and various forums such as Ethereum Magicians. Anyone can listen to or
participate in Ethereum calls and Ethereum Magicians as it is open to all.
These are open-source communities that allow anyone to be a part of their
development and discussions.
Can
a Difficulty Bomb Be Removed?
Yes, it is possible for
a difficulty bomb to be removed, but it would need another network upgrade.
Though several people have argued informally in the past about removing the
bomb, there has not been a proper proposal to do so. The Meta-EIP that is
associated with the Muir Glacier upgrade talks about some of the rationales for
the bomb and potential future improvements.
The Ethereum community
recently discussed the idea of removing the bomb once Eth 2.0 is live and
finalizing blocks on the 1.x chain with the help of the finality gadget. The
primary purpose of the finality gadget is to leverage a property termed
‘finality’ of the Casper proof-of-stake consensus protocol for deployment in Ethereum
2.0.
Conclusion
I hope this article
helped you gain a fair idea of Ethereum’s Muir Glacier. For more information
about Ethereum certifications and to enroll in
online Ethereum certifications and become an Ethereum expert, check out Blockchain Council.
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Created on Mar 30th 2020 01:17. Viewed 432 times.