A live stream meeting of all Ethereum stakeholders; miners, developers, and investors held on Friday, August 24th, 2018, was reported to end with no final conclusion on topics which were meant to be answered ahead of the expected upgrade on the Ethereum network in October.
Matters Discussed
The meeting held among various actors in the industry according to reports had no conclusion. The purpose of the meeting was to reach a consensus on certain matters before a big update to the Ethereum network.
Matters that were discussed included the “difficulty bomb,” a piece of code which will make future upgrades easy. Also discussed was the proposed plan of Ethereum’s switch from the present proof of work (PoW) algorithm to a proof of stake (PoS) in expectation of cutting out specialized mining equipment that had made mining unproductive as they control to a large extent majority of the hash power.
On the issue of reducing the number of Ethers issued per block, Brian Venturo of Atlantic Crypto and Matthew White, a software developer want not just a fixed number per block but also a fixed number of tokens that will ever be in circulation.
But against this was Xin Xu, CEO of Sparkpool. He says,
“There is a tipping point and when we get there everything will break down, and we cannot get back. In my opinion, the change of issuance will be a big impact to the security.”
The Way Forward
As it stands, “difficulty bomb” will not be implemented anytime soon, but probably scheduled “8 months after Constantinople is activated,” said Hudson Jameson, Ethereum Foundation communication officer, who chaired the meeting.
With the proposed release which is scheduled for early 2019, there is still a level of uncertainty whether the plan to switch to the proof of stake algorithm would be implemented alongside or not.
After a long period of talks, Jameson was reported to have admitted not knowing “how to make a decision.” He finally urged the community to keep the discussion ongoing until the follow-on meeting which is expected to occur August 31.
As things stand, the community eagerly waits for a concrete decision by these people as whatever agreed upon would impact the future of ethereum ecosystem.
