Proof of Stake – What If Difficulty Bomb Makes Mining Impossible Before POS Release?

The difficulty bomb is a part of the consensus algorithm; its goal is to make the difficulty of mining a block arbitrarily hard at some point in the future. When active, it will get increasingly hard for miners to create new blocks and therefore will get block rewards less frequently; which means less revenues. Exponentially. From the blog:

starting from block 200,000 (very roughly 17 days from now), the difficulty will undergo an exponential increase which will only become noticeable in about a year.

This is a very strong incentive to rapidly switch to the new network.

According to Vitalik Buterin on r/ethereum, the difficulty bomb was slowed down with homestead a bit.

As it turns out, with the change in the difficulty adjustment algorithm brought about in the last hardfork, the ice age will come very slowly indeed. Originally, the maximum amount by which the difficulty could adjust was 1/2048x, and so given a natural mining difficulty of ~2**45 (where it is now), after around block 3500000, it would go up faster than it goes down, and the protocol would quickly freeze. Now, difficulty can adjust down faster than that if the block time is slow enough, and so even after this point there is an equilibrium. At block 3.5m (1 year from now), we would have an equilibrium block time of 25s for 100k blocks (~1 month); then we would see 35s for 100k more blocks (now ~1.4 months); then ~55s for ~2.2 months, then ~95s for ~3.8 months, and so forth until we get ~655s for ~26 months (ie. slightly worse than bitcoin), and only after that does the protocol break because of the cap of ~99/2048 downward adjustment, and that final doom does not take place until 2021 (though it certainly gets very annoying by the second half of 2017).

TL;DR Blocktime will be annoying in second half of 2017 and the final doom happens somewhere in 2021.