A proposal that is believed to alter how much Ether enters the cryptocurrency economy was finalized on Friday, 31st August, with its developers approving to include the code for such a change into Ethereum’s next upgrade, Constantinople.
Constantinople is intended to upsurge efficiency and lower the transaction fees on blockchain. It is a protocol upgrade that aims to smoothen the transition from a proof-of-work consensus algorithm to proof-of-stake.
According to a post on Github, a group of fourteen developers present on a video call permitted to back the code that would reduce the amount of new cryptocurrency introduced on Ethereum to 2 ETH per block from present 3 ETH per block. This will be done by implementing an advanced version of Ethereum’s improvement upgrade called EIP 1234.
The summary of the report states that, “this EIP proposes to delay the difficulty bomb for approximately one and a half year and to reduce the block rewards with the Constantinople fork, the second part of the Metropolis fork.”
The innovators who attended the meeting also accepted that the difficulty bomb must be delayed for a twelve month period. They also stated that another upgrade is planned to occur eight months after the Constantinople upgrade. With the dispute building on the issuance change and many parties arguing for different outcomes, a reduction of new cryptocurrency introduced on ethereum to 2 ETH was sited to be a conservative choice.
Security researcher Martin Swende said during the call, “I think we also need to be conservative with changes and make changes incrementally, and not dictate changes against the will of the community, but apply conservative measures in doing changes but try to keep them within the intent of the community.”
Danny Ryan, a Casper developer from the Ethereum Foundation, said in the meeting that “issuance discussion” must be seen as an “incremental compromise”, which will make sure things run smoothly until the community transitions to POS consensus.
“Everything I view in the issuance discussion is an incremental compromise to encourage the community and move things sanely until we move to proof-of-stake, which will bring issuance down to the range of 0.5 or 1 per cent per year, and at that point, I think the community will certainly be happy. These are incremental compromises until we get to that goal,” Ryan further added.
However, the developers could not reach an agreement on the change of algorithm that will forbid the usage of ASIC hardware to mine the ether, but a considerable majority agrees that it should be the focus of the research.
