Tech Update - March 18, 2022
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Drops Again
The most significant mining difficulty drop was a result of China’s crypto bans in June 2021. Since July 2021, the difficulty has been on a steady rise, quickly reaching new all time highs. The only significant drop since China’s bans occurred November 27 2021, dropping from 22.674 to 22.336 (a 1.49% decrease). The only other drops on the 1 year chart are from this month, March 1st (1.49% drop) and March 17, 2022 (0.35% drop).
Bitcoin mining will likely be exclusive to large institutions soon, with the global rise of energy and electric prices. This is likely the reason for the most recent slight drop in mining difficulty. The result could also have been affected by Kazakhstan’s recent crypto crackdowns on illegal mining.
Ethereum Is Another Step Closer To Proof-of-Stake
Ethereum merged the Kiln testnet recently, which is expected to be the last merge testnet before the existing testnets are upgraded. The Kiln merge testnet is replacing the Kintsugi merge testnet which was launched in December 2021.
The merge process involves launching a layer under proof-of-work in parallel to the beacon chain running proof-of-stake. Once the chains are merged, the beacon chain takes over the validation of transactions.
An Ethereum developer, Tim Beiko, was publishing updates on twitter during the merge. The merge was mostly successful. The network was stable and post-merge blocks were being properly produced by validators and contained transactions. However, they quickly noticed only two out of three validators were correctly finalizing and procuding blocks.
Read more on CoinDesk
Kiln, the next iteration of Ethereum merge testnets, is now live 🔥🧱
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🔥🧱 (@TimBeiko) March 14, 2022
Highly recommended that node operators, application developers, stakers, tooling/infra providers test their setups on the network. Blog post has all the info to get started 😁https://t.co/TCHBZxcFlt
And we finalized, but it seems there is a client who isn't producing blocks consistently. The network is stable, with >2/3rd of validators correctly finalizing. We're looking into the issue 👀 https://t.co/cgVwdK859r
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🔥🧱 (@TimBeiko) March 15, 2022
