EIP-4345: Difficulty Bomb Delay to May 2022

[timbeiko]

@jdetychey

Nevertheless, I am concerned that removing all together or delaying the bomb again would arm the credibility of the Merge.
If the Merge is close to ready, if we start to tease on social media that tests of merge from clients is going well, let’s the just not delay and do the Merge.

I think this is the crux of things. Even though the merge testing is going well, it isn’t going to happen until the difficulty bomb is due to go off again (early December, as per EIP-3554). We are not ~1 month away from having client releases ready for the merge, so we need to push the bomb back again.

I used this value as a rough proxy of when I think we could ship the merge if everything goes relatively well. If things didn’t go well, then we’d have to push the bomb back again. Obviously the EIP is still a draft and the specific time will need to be discussed further.

@jdetychey

I assume that, with the state of the network today, having even 0.1 sec more delay between blocks would greatly impact the user experience (transaction fees likely going to the roof).

That’s a fair point. In the EIP, I assume that ~1 sec is what starts to be significant for UX impact, but I could be wrong here. If you think that even a 0.1 sec is very bad, then we can push back the block to target a 0.1 sec delay happening after we think the merge would realistically happen.