GlossaryAdvanced
Difficulty Bomb
A mechanism designed to make mining exponentially harder to force a network transition.
A difficulty bomb is a mechanism built into a proof-of-work network's code that gradually and then dramatically increases mining difficulty, intended to make continuing on that consensus mechanism impractical and push the network toward a planned transition.
Ethereum used a difficulty bomb, delayed several times, as one mechanism to encourage its eventual transition to proof of stake.
Examples
- Ethereum's difficulty bomb was delayed multiple times before the network's actual transition to proof of stake.
- A difficulty bomb is a deliberate, code-level incentive toward a planned network change.