A Comprehensive Guide on-Ethereum's Muir Glacier

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A Comprehensive Guide on Ethereums Muir
Glacier

• Ethereum welcomed the new year 2020 in the best
  possible way- with a network upgrade. The Muir
  Glacier hard fork network upgrade was activated
  on 2 January 2020 at block number 9,200,200 with
  a single Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP).
  Muir Glacier is a routine network update. Let us
  get to know more about this in this article.

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What Is Muir Glacier?

• It refers to a proposal for delaying the network
  feature of the Ethereum blockchain named Ice
  Age. The process of mining Ethereum blocks will
  be more time-consuming if they are mined using
  the proof-of-work consensus unless the Ice Age is
  pushed back through a hard fork. The feature was
  primarily developed in the protocol to motivate
  developers to upgrade the network actively.

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• So, the Ice Age began taking effect much earlier
  than expected. This created the need for
  developing another fork close to the previous
  fork. Muir Glacier is a routine network update.
  All the services will remain operational at the
  time of the fork. EIP 2384, the proposal using
  which the Muir Glacier upgrade was activated,
  delays the difficulty bomb for 611 days
  (4,000,000) blocks.

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• Though subsequent changes and network upgrades to
  the difficult bomb have been accompanied by a
  change of issuance of Ether, no reduction
  occurred in the Muir Glacier Upgrade. Hence, the
  issuance remains at 2 ETH per block.

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What Is The Ice Age ?

• Ice Age or Ethereum difficulty bomb is an
  algorithm that has been designed to increase the
  difficulty of mining Ethereum blocks over time.

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History Of The Difficulty Bomb?

• So, what is the reason for the existence of the
  difficulty bomb?
• The concept of the difficulty bomb originates
  from the initial design of Ethereum. Ethereum has
  most often operated under the ethos of
  continuous innovation. This implies that
  frequent upgrades need to be done to the Ethereum
  blockchain. Network upgrades are a costly affair
  for the network as, in that case, each node on
  the network must be upgraded to the latest
  version of the protocol.

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• If the nodes fail to undergo an upgrade, it will
  result in them being forked off the network. The
  coordination costs associated with upgrades have
  also implied that blockchain projects avoided
  them.

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• This is where the difficulty bomb comes into the
  picture. The difficulty bomb was encoded in to
  force regular hard forks as a method of
  normalizing the idea of upgrading the network.
  This provided numerous opportunities to make
  other protocol upgrades. The difficulty bomb has
  been reset with respect to making other protocol
  changes.

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Participating In Future Ethereum Discussions

• With respect to protocol changes, there were
  discussions regarding the Ethereum developer call
  and various forums such as Ethereum Magicians.
  Anyone can listen to or participate in Ethereum
  calls and Ethereum Magicians as it is open to
  all. These are open-source communities that allow
  anyone to be a part of their development and
  discussions.

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Can A Difficulty Bomb Be Removed?

• Yes, it is possible for a difficulty bomb to be
  removed, but it would need another network
  upgrade. Though several people have argued
  informally in the past about removing the bomb,
  there has not been a proper proposal to do so.
  The Meta-EIP that is associated with the Muir
  Glacier upgrade talks about some of the
  rationales for the bomb and potential future
  improvements.

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• The Ethereum community recently discussed the
  idea of removing the bomb once Eth 2.0 is live
  and finalizing blocks on the 1.x chain with the
  help of the finality gadget. The primary purpose
  of the finality gadget is to leverage a property
  termed finality of the Casper proof-of-stake
  consensus protocol for deployment in Ethereum
  2.0.

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Conclusion

• I hope this article helped you gain a fair idea
  of Ethereums Muir Glacier. For more information
  about Ethereum certifications and to enroll in
  online Ethereum certifications and become an
  Ethereum expert, check out Blockchain Council.

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Blockchain Council Certifications

• You can check out our certifications, and kick
  start your career in the Blockchain space today.
• Certified Blockchain Expert
• Certified Blockchain Developer
• Certified Smart Contract Developer
• Certified Solidity Developer
• Certified Ethereum Developer

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