Rachel Rose O'Leary writes about difficulty bomb.

"…Communications officer for Parity Technologies, Afri Schoedon, told CoinDesk:
"We are moving toward a decision with fast steps now."

Balancing act
At the time of writing, there are three EIPs to be included in the upcoming hard fork that aren't controversial at all, and have already been implemented in code and are currently undergoing testing.
These include EIP 145, EIP 1014, and EIP 1052, which respectively, seek to add new flexibility to ethereum's operations, facilitating scaling measures such as state channels and increasing the speed at which contracts can be verified.
Aside from these however, other proposals require careful coordination.
As reported by CoinDesk, much of the current division was aired last Friday, when developers initiated a public discussion with several representatives of the platform's key stakeholders.
While no consensus was reached, several stakeholders have since taken to social media to lay out their concerns.
In a blog post published Monday, CTO of a mining startup named Atlantic Crypto, Brian Venturo, warned that "the security of the ethereum network is not something to compromise over." He championed EIP 1295 as the only proposal that doesn't potentially lower security.
EIP 1295 does not reduce issuance, but rather reduces the amount of ether that is rewarded to uncles, a kind of block that speeds transactions but isn't included in the blockchain itself
"If you reduce the block reward you're going to price out a large proportion of hardware," Venturo told CoinDesk, stating that such hardware might instead become available for attacks if the reward for malicious services is higher.
While miners are pushing back against the issuance reduction, at the same time, ETH traders are pointing to the dropping market valuation of ether, stating that steps must be taken to preserve the value of the currency by limiting issuance.
In a Twitter thread that compared current bitcoin's current issuance rate to ethereum, a trader named Eric Conner remarked that if the reduction is pushed down to 2 ETH, it doesn't slip lower than bitcoin's current rate.
According to Conner, such a reduction is necessary to preserve the value of the network.
"Fun fact! In the past 365 days, the ethereum network has paid $6.6 [billion] to miners," Conner tweeted.

Pixabay

The compromise

Adding to the criticism is that founder of ethereum Vitalik Buterin has pushed back against EIP 1295, writing on Github that it could result in the further centralization of mining pools. "I'm scared of this," Buterin wrote.
An investor and fund manager named Spencer Noon also pushed back against the proposal.
"I'm completely unsupportive of EIP 1295 and I question the motive of its author (Atlantic Crypto Corp)," Noon tweeted, "ACC is a mining company run by former hedge funders. This has nothing to do with 'network security' — a block reward reduction would hurt their bottom line."
Several Reddit posts have followed a similar tone, and in response, the mining company has retracted its current proposal in favor of arguing that the issuance reduction should remain at 3 ETH.
"We agree that the ETH denominated issuance may be too high, but we also believe that adjusting it under the current market conditions will put undue risk on the security scale of the network," Venturo wrote on Github.
Speaking in a developer meeting Friday, Casper developer Danny Ryan said that a reduction to 2 ETH seems like a "reasonable compromise" that could balance the interests of both traders and miners. Similarly, because GPU miners are struggling to compete with ASICs, a removal of the hardware from the platform through a proof-of-work change would be another "reasonable compromise."
Toward this, a GPU miner and enthusiast named Kristy-Leigh Minehan is championing an code fix to be implemented in Constantinople.
Still, some feel it's unlikely it will make the cut.
"This would be a lot more work to implement than the other EIPs," Michael Hahn, of ethereum wallet MyCrypto, told CoinDesk…"

*The source: “Ethereum's Next Upgrade Could Be the $29 Billion Blockchain's Biggest Test Yet” By Rachel Rose O'Leary (originally published on the Coindesk).