Remember, the widely talked about Ethereum Difficulty bomb? Well, one coder has come up with a solution that will not require successive forks to keep delaying it. The new proposal, registered under EIP 2125, offers a new system to freeze the difficulty increases while incentivizing the miners to keep mining on the block – “the Difficulty Freeze”.

EIP2125: The Difficulty Freeze solution

In the Ethereum mining process, a difficulty block is defined as the increasing difficulty in mining on the network causing an inflated time to produce one block. Ethereum’s Difficulty bomb is a problem that has impacted mining on the ETH chain for a while now. Developers and the community alike, have been on the edge to offer a permanent solution for the problem but to no avail.

Developers have periodically carried out forks to delay the difficulty bombs but one developer has come up with a better proposal; the Difficulty Freeze.

According to a tweet sent out on Feb. 13 by James Hancock, who came up with the idea, asking the community on a way forward to deal with the Difficulty Bomb, an overwhelming majority of the community chose to “improve the design” rather than “remove” the Difficulty Bomb.

Ethereum Ice Age/ Difficulty Bomb poll. This is for gathering Information to bring to the Core Devs.

More info about the bomb: https://t.co/j5ZWyLgUrq…

🙏 RTs are considered helping awareness, not supporting one side or the other. 🙏

Would you rather ____ the Difficulty Bomb.

— James Hancock 🏗 (@JHancock) February 13, 2020

Well, the difficulty bomb offers its own advantages by allowing clients to upgrade their systems hence not stalling the progress of development and removing it would impact incentives of reward changes. That said, Hancock’s Difficulty Freeze is set to solve this issues without getting rid of the Bomb.

According to his proposal, the freeze will incentivize developers to regularly upgrade their systems if implemented, forcing every chain split to follow through with the Difficulty freeze. He writes,

“The Difficulty Freeze begins at a certain block height, determined in advance, and freezes the difficulty. This does not stop the chain, but it incentivizes devs to upgrade at a regular cadence and requires any chain split to address the difficulty freeze.”

While the Muir Glacier hard fork, completed in early January, was successful, the community criticized the developers for once again delaying a solution to the Difficulty Bomb. If the EIP 2125 process is adopted, Ethereum’s key problem may be solved before the community welcomes Ethereum 2.0 proof of stake mechanism.