With increasing block times and ETH dipping below $1,000 we at least have some good news for miners. The block times of ETH as of 6/18/2022 are set to 14.75 seconds are only planning on going up due to the difficulty bomb.
Difficulty Bomb Delay
A recent tweet from Tim Beiko talks about the Gray Glacier Upgrade. This upgrade will take place on block 15,050,000 and will push back the difficulty bomb, ever so slightly increasing profitability for miners. They are planning on setting the block times back to 14 seconds.
The Gray Glacier Upgrade
This upgrade is expected to take place on Wednesday June 29, 2022. It is recommended if you are staking ETH to upgrade your Node before Monday June 27th, 2022. This upgrade aims to push the bomb back 700,000 blocks or an estimated 100 days which should be just enough time for them to push out the ETH 2.0 merge.
Why Decrease Block Times
When block times increase, the network becomes slower and miners make less money. When miners make less money, if there is competition, they switch over to other alt coins which in turn decreases the security of ETH. With ERGO coming out with NETA and increasing profitability on the chain above ETH this will make some miners switch over as ETH is planning on not being a mineable coin in the future and ERGO will stay PoW. This decrease in block times will help keep miners on the ETH chain securing transactions.
We can already see miners turning off their rigs or switching to other coins on the ETH network hash rate chart. We saw an all time high of 1,126,674.2703 GH.s on May 13, 2022. As of June 17th, 2022 we can see the average daily hash rate is sitting around 990,357.099 GH/s. This is roughly a 13% decrease in daily network hash rate in a matter of 1 month.
