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Comment by Gaelan | Hacker News Reader

What’s this about an “ice age”?

The Ethereum "ice age" is a mechanism to ensure smooth transition to future planned hard forks. By tweaking the difficulty adjustment formula to artificially increase block times after some time (the so called "difficulty bomb") it makes mining on the old chain unprofitable, and incentivizes everyone to move to the/a new one. The general idea is to prevent extreme conservatism and stagnation w.r.t. hard forks, as we are seeing in Bitcoin.

So is this giving the developers the control instead of - as with Bitcoin - the large mining pools? Is that any better?

Incidentally, in Bitcoin, large mining pools do not have control over the consensus rules. It doesn't matter what the miners say, their chain is worthless if people refuse to run it.

In Bitcoin, the economic majority decides what is Bitcoin. And when there's a substantial disagreement (e.g. BCC) there's a fork.

Large mining pools have no more power to enforce consensus rule changes on others than anybody else does.

Miners can attack rival chains with the same PoW -- so they do have some extra power over "similar" chains.

Attacks that cost them money to the tune of millions of dollars. Sure they can do it but it's not free.

The former offers far more visibility than the latter for say in the future.

So yes, IMO it is.

Otherwise private concentration of power will do as it always does: leverage it's monopoly to control the system as a whole.

The discussion & development are in the open. The large mining pools can sit at the table and discuss the changes as a part of the community. Or fork off.

As far as I understand there's a build in ice age/difficulty bomb every year so that clients that don't follow the hard fork will essentially stop working. This incentivizes/forces clients to update and also effectively minimizes the chance of a chain split where some group would just keep running on the old chain. If someone wants to make a chain split, they will have to fork too

It's just as easy to create a second hard fork disabling the bomb if some group wants to keep the old rules.

Yes, but that requires some group to agree on this and to run new code, even if it only removes the difficulty bomb. This is not as trivial as you make it out to be, especially because some individuals that may disagree with the 'main' development branch may also still value the difficulty bomb.

It's obvious that this does not prevent disagreement about the protocol, but it greatly affects a fairly large class of disagreements and changes the incentives for a variety of behaviors. It's all game theory, and as such minor changes to the premise of a 'game' can have large impacts on how it plays out.

It's not perfect, but I think it is good.

Sure, but it at least prevents the legacy chain from having an advantage due to inertia.

The ice age is a drastic increase in difficulty that was planned at launch to force the developers to release a proof of stake algorithm. The idea was that no one would want to actually switch to a proof of stake when the time came (miners would lose all their profit, and miners have a lot of power - see current bitcoin situation)

To convince early adopters that there would actually be a switch to proof of stake the ice age was conceived. The ice age can be delayed however as we see here (this isn't the first time its been delayed either)

Switching from proof of work to proof of stake will probably be hard to pull off without disruption.

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