Is Serenity The Solution To Ethereum's Difficulty Bomb?

Ethereum has four milestone phases in its development post-release; Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity.

Ethereum has had a difficulty bomb - a protocol that makes mining the cryptocurrency more difficult - programmed into its Blockchain since the Frontier phase.

A major change that comes with Serenity is that Ethereum's Blockchain consensus algorithm will change from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

The difficulty bomb was first mentioned on August 4, 2015 in a blog post by former Ethereum's chief commercial officer Stephan Tual that announced the first patch to Frontier.

"A lot of you have been wondering how we would implement a switch from PoW to PoS in time for Serenity. This will be handled by the newly introduced difficulty adjustment scheme, which elegantly guarantees a hard-fork point in the next 16 months it works as follows: starting from block 200,000, the difficulty will undergo an exponential increase, which will only become noticeable in about a year. At that point, we'll see a significant increase in difficulty which will start pushing the block resolution time upwards."

The protocol to increase mining difficulty was introduced to the Ethereum network on Sep.

If the Ethereum network is beginning to feel the effects of the difficulty bomb in the latter part of 2018, we would most likely see Ethereum hard fork to the next milestone, Metropolis v. Constantinople, which would be the first milestone version to introduce the PoS system to the Ethereum Blockchain.

Although a majority of the transactions on the Ethereum network will remain PoW, every 100th transaction will be PoS in Constantinople, which will lay the groundwork for Casper, the PoS system used in Serenity - Ethereum's final milestone.

The PoS system will be in full swing by the time Ethereum upgrades to Serenity, the final milestone in Ethereum's roadmap.

At the Serenity phase, Ethereum will be a Blockchain business with a built-in turing-complete programming language that can be used by other developers, companies, and entities to create contracts, applications, and systems.