The Ethereum network will soon conduct a planned Arrow glacier upgrade with the same purpose as the Muir glacier upgrade. Basically Arrow Glacier changes the delay parameters of the network difficulty bombs to June 2022. Therefore, the network has an additional 6 months before the PoS transition “Ice Age” is implemented.

Arrow Glacier Delays “Ice Age” of Ethereum

At the Ethereum block height of 13,773,000, the network will perform the Arrow Glacier upgrade to delay the difficulty bomb accordingly notification officially. The bombing mechanism has been around since 2015 and it causes the network’s mining difficulty to increase over time. At some point this mechanism will lead to an “ice age” – the time when the blockchain stops producing PoW blocks and the chain is completely 100% dependent on the PoS consensus.

The difficulty bomb is set to occur after 4,000,000 blocks, or 611 days after the Muir Glacier upgrade. Arrow Glacier will, however, postpone the bomb until June 2022. This means that the miners still have 6 months to continue mining Ethereum. Once the bomb explodes, the mining difficulty causes the PoW miners to gradually give up because it is too difficult.

Arrow Glacier is scheduled to take place today, December 8th, 2021. The developers explain:

“Similar to the Muir Glacier, the Arrow Glacier network upgrade changes the Ice Age / Difficulty Bomb statistics and postpones them by a few months. This also happened during the armament of Byzantium, Constantinople and London. Other than that, Arrow Glacier has no other changes.

The difficulty bomb only affects the PoW network and therefore only exists in the Ethereum mainnet and the Ropsten testnet. Given the recent progress in the transition from Ethereum to PoS, the developers decided to delay the bomb on the mainnet for the time being and try to do the PoS transition on Ropsten before the bomb goes off the network. ”

Ethereum hashrate hits all-time high

While the participants of the Ethereum network have to wait for a longer PoS transition “Ice Age”, ETH miners continue to receive rewards from this PoW network. On the morning of December 7th, the hashrate of Ethereum hit 1 petahash per second (PH / s), which is the highest value ever, and has now dropped to 900 terahashes per second (TH / s).

In addition, after KDA, ETH is the second most profitable cryptocurrency that is currently being mined. At $ 0.12 per kilowatt hour (kWh) and today’s ETH price, a machine with a capacity of 1,500 megahash per second (MH / s) can earn around $ 91 per day. Mining ETH with an ETH mining rig is 68.85% more profitable than BTC mining with the currently most powerful SHA256 bitcoin miner and makes a profit of over USD 28 per day.

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