What is Ethereum’s difficulty bomb? Why was it introduced?

What is the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb?

Difficulty bomb is a term that refers to the fact that as the difficulty of mining increases, the time required to mine a new block on the Ethereum blockchain will increase. This will eventually lead to no more Ethereum to mine and no profit. If you want to know the difficulty of Ethereum mining, you can view the difficulty of Ethereum mining through the Tokenview Ethereum browser.

The Ethereum “difficulty bomb” is a piece of code that Ethereum developers embedded in 2015 to artificially slow down the issuance of Ethereum by gradually increasing the difficulty of mining on the blockchain. This mechanism was designed to enable Ethereum’s huge transition to a proof-of-stake algorithm.

Why introduce a difficulty bomb?

Ethereum (ETH) is trying to solve this problem by switching the existing Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. Mining rewards will be determined by the size of the participants' staked funds, rather than by the current electricity and resource-intensive computer computing power. If an algorithm shift occurs, the Ethereum community may choose to completely remove or delay the difficulty bomb through a hard fork.

If all miners do not switch to proof-of-stake, Ethereum’s blockchain could fork.