BBT Carter post on EIP #649 - Eth Difficulty Bomb and Reduction of Block Rewards

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/669

• this is a snip from our discussion with Ethereum Development community regarding delayed disabling of the diff. bomb. - Thread in link above

For the folks that are contributing to this conversation and rolling shotgun, from the hip math calculations, do you actually partake in the activity of mining? If you do not, I would suggest you reach out to someone (locally) that you can have a conversation with, in person. Understand the cost of doing business, what the potential impacts of the decisions you're discussing from all sides of the equations.

Most of this math that you speak of is distributed value because the size of pie (proverbial individual miners i.e. the decentralized network participants) have increased exponentially, with correlation of price increase. Any 'forced' reduction, be that a reduction of Eth and/or a continued artificially driving up of difficulty reduces the margin of share for all of those participants. Every miner feels the proverbial impact of your decisions, agnostic to their size. The 'network' effects is pretty simple actually, at the cost of dorking with the output (be that difficulty) or (yield of inflation, coin distro amount per block) you are changing the terms and artificially impacting who will continue to participate.

As the price rose and more participates (miners) joined, the distribution spread and the reduction of coin per person automatically decreased based on the dynamics of what was already known, more people = more difficulty = less coin; and the natural order of thing create a equilibrium. Ethereum already is at the point with this artificial difficulty adjustment at the precipice of losing many of the individual contributor miners (single rig, dual rig folks) as they have started to by and large mine other coins. Signatum, ZCASH, Ubiq, Musicoin have all had exponential difficulty growths do to the movement over. The next artificial increase will move another drove of people over.

At the end of the day, I agree with a statement a few post ago, an equilibrium will be established, with far less participation on the network and be far more centralized mining that the current tens of thousands of participants. The only difference is it's not based on the natural order created by PoW retargeting of difficulty only; it's done artificially by the continued delay on defusing the diff. bomb.

In closing, a movement to reduce the inflation through having I put in a different category. I firmly believe if you allow PoW to predicate the Difficulty to establish a notional block time, equilibrium of participants will come and go based on those factors. Halving is a mechanism to reduce inflation and if on a published schedule the expectations are set with the community. Market dynamics and the network effect of those factors by and large are understood (i.e. bitcoin). The key point is ensuring clear and concise direction is published. Your basic publications on Capser and POS was published and most all people knew it would be coming and have been getting ready for it. The execution of the difficult bomb was understood and when it started played into the basic dynamics. The second you guys slipped the schedule for POS last month however, the difficult bomb should of been defused then. The artificial game changing effects impact you more than any decision and direction you go with. Forced uncertainty is your worst enemy.

Bottom line we request:

• Difficulty Bomb be disabled immediately, let the network fall back to total network hash predicated difficulty
• If they chose to reduce (having) like bitcoin, then publish a schedule like bitcoin and other's have so market dynamics understand when this will occur as other successful chains have done with reward reductions (by and large deflation is 'good' for a network and any 'value' supply)
• The uncertainty is what is the biggest enemy here