Constantinople, the Ethereum network’s upcoming hard fork upgrade, will involve the implementation of five distinct ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs). The backward-incompatible update, scheduled tentatively for October, will make permanent modifications to Ethereum’s existing codebase, which are aimed at improving its network efficiency and fee structure.
Additionally, the Constantinople upgrade is intended to make the necessary (and incremental) changes required for the Ethereum blockchain to scale effectively. Addressing the smart contract platform’s severe scalability issues, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that the world’s largest DApp network will eventually be able to process 1 million transactions per second (TPS).
“Difficulty Bomb” Delayed For 12 Months
Moreover, the Constantinople hard fork is expected to make adjustments to Ethereum’s economic policy, which partly focuses on delaying the difficulty bomb (for approximately 12 months) – often referred to as the Ethereum Ice Age.
As covered on CryptoGlobe, 14 Ethereum developers agreed during a video conference (on August 31st) that they would support EIP1234. According to Ethereum’s Github repository:
The average block times are increasing due to the difficulty bomb … slowly accelerating. This EIP proposes to delay the difficulty bomb for approximately 12 months and to reduce the block rewards with the Constantinople fork, the second part of the Metropolis fork.
The overall response to postponing the difficulty bomb has been well-received (mostly crypto traders) by the Ethereum community, even though it will likely making mining the cryptocurrency less profitable. Notably, a number Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) token miners expressed their frustration regarding significantly declining rewards for mining ETH.
$0.05 Mining Reward, $150 Electricity Costs
Redditor Macrnonut revealed that he had switched to mining Ethereum Classic (ETC) because he claims only making 0.5 cents from mining ETH after paying $150 in electricity costs. Meanwhile, another reddit user said “it’s time to start selling (mining} rigs.”
Despite concerns regarding reduced incentives for mining Ether, Ethereum’s developers are moving forward with the Constantinople upgrade. The hard fork will reduce the payout to miners from 3 ETH to 2 ETH for every block mined on the Ethereum blockchain.
At present, the Constantinople codebase is in its final stages of review and testing, and an exact block number for when the Ethereum chain will fork has not been determined. The following interdependent EIPs will go into effect with Constantinople:
- EIP 145 – more cost-effective and efficient approaching to processing information
- EIP 1014: better approach to accommodating network scaling solutions such as off-chain transactions
- EIP 1052 – an improvement on how contracts are processed
- EIP1234 – 12-month delay of difficulty bomb; reduce mining rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH
- EIP 1283 – a better way to monetize data storage changes (made by smart contract programmers)
