New ETH Hard Fork Forced In January To Erase All Mistakes

New ETH hard fork will happen in January 2020 after the Istanbul upgrade since mistakes keep happening on the ETH network as we can read in the Ethereum news further.

During the previous Istanbul update earlier this month, the developers made a mistake when they estimated when till the feature is known as a difficulty bomb that is able to slow down the blocks aka Ice Age, will become a massive threat expecting that it would not become noticeable until mid-2020 according to a blog post posted by Pooja Ranjan who is the founder of the blockchain company Avarch and the EtherWorld project. The bomb will go off earlier than it was presumed originally so another hard fork is therefore needed to delay it.

As the Ethereum core devs meeting ended, it was agreed that a new hard fork Muir Glacier, will be activated at block number 9,200,000 at the beginning of January 2020. This will also delay Ice Age by 4 million blocks. Ethereum is planned to eventually switch from the proof of work consensus algorithm also used in Bitcoin to proof of stake algorithm on its way to Ethereum 2.0. in the meantime, the developers came up with a difficulty bomb or better known as the Ice Age which is a mechanism that gradually makes generating new blocks much more difficult and the mining becomes unprofitable. The ETH developer James Hancock explained:

 “The ice age increments every 100,000 blocks. It at first is barely noticeable, but once it is visible, there is a drastic effect on block-times in the network.”

Hancock proposed that the hard fork called Muir Glacier will push the Ice Age so the developers will have the time to see if they want to proceed with the update or will they remove it. Not everyone believes that the new ETH hard fork will fix the problem. The biggest critic so far has been the developer and supporter Udi Wertheimer who claims that the Ethereum devs and the entire ecosystem ‘’forgot to take care of an issue which caused an unplanned reduction of TWENTY PERCENT in inflation rate and security and that this is an EPIC oversight but according to ETH proponents, I’m just being hyperbolic.’’